[J. G. a. Pocock] Virtue, Commerce, And History E(BookFi.org)

Virtue, Commerce, and History

IDEAS IN CONTEXT

Edited by Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions andof related new disciplines. The procedures, aims, and vocabularies that weregenerated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the con-temporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of theevolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences, itis hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their con-crete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of phi-losophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature maybe seen to dissolve.

Forthcoming titles include the following:

Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (eds.),Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy

David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation DeterminedNoel Malcolm, Hobbes and VoluntarismQuentin Skinner, Studies in Early Modern Intellectual HistoryEdmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern

EuropeLynn Joy, Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of

ScienceMark Goldie, The Tory Ideology: Politics and Ideas in Restoration

England

This series is published with the support of the Exxon Education Foundation.

Virtue, Commerce,and History

Essays on Political Thought and History,Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century

J. G. A. POCOCK

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of CambridgeThe Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

© Cambridge University Press 1985

First published 1985Reprinted 1986, 1988, 1991, 1995 (twice)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 0-521-25701-8 hardbackISBN 0-521-27660-8 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2002

To my colleagues and friends in the

Conference for the Study of Political Thought

Contents

1 Introduction: The state of the art

PARTI

2 Virtues, rights, and manners: A model for historians of politicalthought 37

3 Authority and property: The question of liberalorigins 51

4 1776: The revolution against Parliament 73

PART II

5 Modes of political and historical time in early eighteenth-

century England 91

6 The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century

sociology 103

7 Hume and the American Revolution: The dying thoughts of a

North Briton 125

8 Gibbon's Decline and Fall and the world view of the Late

Enlightenment 143

9 Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price: A study in the

varieties of eighteenth-century conservatism 157

10 The political economy of Burke's analysis of the French

Revolution 193

X CONTENTS

PART III

11 The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A historyof ideology and discourse 215

I From the First Whigs to the True Whigs, 215II From the Financial Revolution to the Scottish

Enlightenment, 230III From the Seven Years' War to the Constitution of the

United States, 253IV From the response to the American Revolution to the

reaction to the French Revolution, 274V From Cobbett's History of the Reformation to Macaulay's

History of England, 295

Index 311

IntroductionThe state of the art

Of the ten essays that compose the remainder of this volume, nine were originallypublished between 1976 and 1982, though one or two were written for spokendelivery substantially earlier than their appearance in print. The last, which con-stitutes the whole of Part III, receives separate introduction. As a constellationthey represent work on the history of political discourse in England, Scotland,and America, chiefly between the English Revolution of 1688 and the FrenchRevolution of 1789, though Part III pursues the intimations of this history intothe half-century following the latter event. This work has been done at a timewhen perceptions of "British history" are continuing to change, perhaps moredrastically than for some time past, and when perceptions of what constitutes"the history of political thought" have been undergoing intensive scrutiny andrestatement. Though the present volume is intended as a contribution to thepractice, not the theory, of its branch of historiography, it is necessary to intro-duce it with a statement of where it stands in the process of change regarding thehistory of political thought. To describe a practice and its entailments, however,especially when these are understood to be in process of change, cannot be donewithout employing, and to some degree exploring, the language of theory.

I have already used two terms, the history of political thought and the historyof political discourse, which are discernibly not identical. The former term isretained here, and in the nomenclature of learned institutions and journals, be-cause it is familiar and conventional and serves to mobilize our energies in theright directions, and also because it is by no means inappropriate. The activitiesit directs us to study are visibly those of men and women thinking; the speechthey employ is self-critical and self-refining, and regularly ascends toward levelsof theory, philosophy, and science. Nevertheless, the change that has come over

2 VIRTUE, COMMERCE, AND HISTORY

this branch of historiography in the past two decades may be characterized as amovement away from emphasizing history of thought (and even more sharply,"of ideas") toward emphasizing something rather different, for which "history ofspeech" or "history of discourse," although neither of them unproblematic orirreproachable, may be the best terminology so far found. To show how thismovement has come about, and what it entails, is necessary in order to introduceits practice.

In a Cambridge-centered retrospect, some of this movement's origins may bediscovered in the linguistic analysis favored by philosophers in the 1950s, whichtended to present thoughts as propositions appealing to a limited number ofmodes of validation; others in the speech-act theories developed in Oxford andelsewhere about the same time, which tended to present thoughts as utterancesperforming upon those who heard them, and indeed upon those who utteredthem. Both tended to focus attention upon the great variety of things that couldbe said or seen to have been said, and upon the diversity of linguistic contextsthat went to determine what could be said but were at the same time acted uponby what was said. It is obvious enough what the historians of political thoughthave been doing with the perceptions thus offered them; but it is curious, inretrospect — and perhaps evidence of the difficulty of getting philosophers to talkabout the same things as historians - that the series Philosophy, Politics and Society,which Peter Laslett began to edit in 1956, devoted itself almost wholly to theanalysis and exploration of political statements and problems, and hardly at allto determining their historical status or to the historiography of political argu-ment.1 Paradoxically, at the very same time that Laslett was announcing that"for the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead,"2 the history of politicalthought, including philosophy (if philosophy can be included in anything) wasabout to undergo a fairly dramatic revival, due in large part to Laslett himself. Itwas Laslett's editorial work on Filmer and Locke3 that taught others, includingthe present writer, the frameworks, both theoretical and historical, in which theyshould set their researches.

There began to take shape a historiography, with characteristic emphases: firston the variety of idioms, or "languages" as they came to be known, in whichpolitical argument might be conducted (an example might be the language of

^ h e three exceptions that may be said to prove this rule are J. G. A. Pocock, "The History ofPolitical Thought: A Methodological Enquiry," in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, ed.Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford, 1962); Quentin Skinner, " 'Social Meaning' and theExplanation of Social Action," and John Dunn, "The Identity of the History of Ideas," both inPhilosophy, Politics and Society: Fourth Series, ed. Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and QuentinSkinner (Oxford, 1972).

2 Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), p. vii.^Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949); John Locke: Two Treatises ofGovernment (Cambridge, I960; rev. ed., 1963).

Introduction: The state of the art 3

the common law as a constituent of what we now know as ancient constitution-alism)4 and second, on the participants in political argument as historical actors,responding to one another in a diversity of linguistic and other political andhistorical contexts that gave the recoverable history of their argument a very richtexture. The republication of Filmer's writings in 1679 was seen to have evokedresponses as linguistically diverse as Locke's First from his Second Treatise, or Al-gernon Sidney's Discourses on Government from either, and at the same time to haveevoked, from those concerned to reply to the Freeholder's Grand Inquest5 ratherthan to Patriarcha, responses of yet another kind: the controversy between Petytand Brady, or the revision of Harrington by his associate Henry Neville.6 Allthese threads in the history of argument could be followed as they diverged andconverged again; there began to emerge a history of actors uttering and respond-ing in a shared yet diverse linguistic context. The question why all this lookedlike a revolution in the historiography of political thought requires one to de-scribe the state of the art before all this happened, and it is difficult to do sowithout setting up straw men. The immediate point is that there has ever sincebeen a felt (and answered) need to redescribe the historiography of political thoughtand its entailments, and to define its practice in terms more rigorously historical.

It has been usual to suggest that in Mo tempore the disciplines of political theoryand the history of political thought had become confounded, and that the adventof an analytic and linguistic philosophy that was severely ahistorical helped greatlyto disentangle them. But if the linguistic philosophers did not concern them-selves with the writing of history, the historians were slow to draw upon or tocontribute to the philosophy of speech acts and propositions. The present writeris aware that he did not so much learn from the contributors to Philosophy, Politicsand Society as discover that he had been learning from them; it was left to thepractice to discover its own entailments. The analysis of scientific inquiry in theturbulent passage from Popper to Kuhn and beyond had its importance, but itwas only in the middle 1960s, with the first appearance of writings by QuentinSkinner, that historians of political thought began to state the logic of their owninquiry and pursue it into fields where it encountered the philosophy of language.There began a discussion that continues to produce a vigorous and extensiveliterature.7 It would be difficult, and might not be useful, to trace all its intri-

4 J . G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in theSeventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957).

5James Tyrrell and William Petyt regarded this work as of the same tendency as the writingspublished under Filmer's name, and I do not therefore enter into the present controversy regardingits authorship. See Corinne Comstock Weston, "The Authorship of the Freeholder's Grand Inquest,"English Historical Review XCV, 1 (1980), pp. 74-98.

6Caroline Robbins, ed., Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge, 1969).7 Bibliographies complete to the moment of their compilation may be found in Quentin Skinner,

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 1, The Renaissance, pp.285-6; Lotte Mulligan, Judith Richards, and John K. Graham, "Intentions and Conventions: A


cacies or attempt to write its history; yet the need to describe the present state ofthe art obliges us to giwe an account of its chief characteristics.

Professor Skinner is known for having made, at different times, two pro-nouncements on the objectives which a historian of this kind should pursue. Theearlier of these stressed the importance of recovering the intentions which anauthor was carrying out in his text; the objections that have been made to thisproposal have not destroyed it, but have rather pointed out the need in somerespects to go beyond it. For example, it has been asked whether we can recoverthe author's intentions from his text without becoming imprisoned in the her-meneutic circle. The answer is that this may indeed be a danger when we haveno evidence regarding the intentions other than the text itself; in practice, thisis sometimes the case but not always. There may be evidence, unreliable andtreacherous but still usable, from the author's other writings or his private cor-respondence; an admirable habit of preserving the letters of learned men hasprevailed among antiquaries for hundreds of years. The more evidence the histo-rian can mobilize in the construction of hypotheses regarding the author's inten-tions, which can be then be applied to or tested against the text itself, the betterhis chances of escaping from the hermeneutic circle, or the more circles of thiskind his critics will have to construct in the attempt to dismount him.

A more penetrating objection has been that which asks whether a mens auctortscan be said to exist independently of his sermo, that is, whether a set of intentionscan be isolated as existing in the author's mind, to which he then proceeds togiwe effect in writing and publishing his text. Do not the intentions come intobeing only as they are effected in the text? How can he know what he thinks, orwhat he wanted to say, until he sees what he has said? Self-knowledge is retro-spective, and every author is his own owl of Minerva. Evidence of the kind men-tioned in the preceding paragraph can still be mobilized, on occasion, in orderto point out that an author of whom enough is known can be said to have hadbefore him a number of possible actions, giving effect to a variety of intentions,and that the act he did perform, and the intentions to which he did give effect,may have differed from some other act he could have performed and may evenhave meditated performing. But the objection with which we are dealing cutsdeeper than this. It asks not only whether intentions can exist before being artic-

Critique of Quentin Skinner's Method for the Study of the History of Ideas," Political Studies XXVI,1 (1979), pp. 84-98; J. G. A. Pocock, "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in Historyand Ideology," Journal of Modern History LIII, 1 (1981), pp. 50-1 n. 9; James H. Tully, "The PenIs a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner's Analysis of Politics," British Journal of Political Science XIII,4(1983), pp. 489-509.

It should be mentioned that there are said to be levels of language - having to do with computertechnology, market research,or something of the kind - at which the phrase "state of the art" hastaken on some short-lived significance. The present author has no desire to be read in that sense.He believes himself to be practicing an art whose present state can be reflectively examined, and hehopes that this note may be of interest to historians.


ulated in a text, but whether they can be said to exist apart from the language inwhich the text is to be constructed. The author inhabits a historically given worldthat is apprehensible only in the ways rendered available by a number of histori-cally given languages; the modes of speech available to him give him the inten-tions he can have, by giving him the means he can have of performing them. Atthis point the objection has raised the question of langue as well as parole, oflanguage context as well as of speech act.

This had, of course, been part of Skinner's contention. His insistence on therecovery of intentions had been to some degree destructive in its purpose; it wasaimed at eliminating from consideration those intentions an author could nothave conceived or carried into effect, because he lacked the language in whichthey could have been expressed and employed some other, articulating and per-forming other intentions. Skinner's method, therefore, has impelled us towardthe recovery of an author's language no less than of his intentions, toward treatinghim as inhabiting a universe of langues that give meaning to the paroles he per-forms in them. This by no means has the effect of reducing the author to themere mouthpiece of his own language; the more complex, even the more contra-dictory, the language context in which he is situated, the richer and more am-bivalent become the speech acts he is capable of performing, and the greaterbecomes the likelihood that these acts will perform upon the context itself andinduce modification and change within it. At this point the history of politicalthought becomes a history of speech and discourse, of the interactions of langueand parole; the claim is made not only that its history is one of discourse, but thatit has a history by virtue of becoming discourse.

There seems no doubt, however, that the focus of attention has moved in somemeasure from the concept of intention toward that of performance. At one levelof theory, this is reflected in Professor Skinner's writings on speech acts andrelated matters; at one level of practice, in his dictum - to be seen in The Foun-dations of Modern Political Thought and forming the second of those pronounce-ments mentioned earlier — that if we are to have a history of political thoughtconstructed on authentically historical principles, we must have means of know-ing what an author "was doing"8 when he wrote, or published, a text. The twowords quoted prove to contain a wealth of meanings. In colloquial English, toask what an actor "was doing" is often to ask "what he was up to," that is, whathe was "playing at " or "getting at." What, in short, was the (sometimes con-cealed) purposive strategy of his actions? The notion of intention has certainlynot been abandoned, as is evident also in the idiom - a favorite one with Skinner- that speaks of an author as performing this or that "move." But we also find it

8Skinner, Foundations, vol. 1, p. xi (the approach "might begin to give us a history of politicaltheory with a genuinely historical character") and p. xiii ("it enables us to characterise what theirauthors were doing in writing" the classic texts).


possible to ask whether an actor "knew what he was doing," implying the pos-sibility of a gap between intention and effect, or between consciousness of theeffect and the effect itself; to ask this is to ask what the effect was, to whom andat what point in time it became apparent, and to confront the fact that actionsperformed in an open-ended time context produce an open-ended series of effects.The question what an author was doing therefore can have a great many answers,and it is even theoretically (though somewhat figuratively) conceivable that theauthor has not finished doing things yet. We need not, however, inquire whetherhistory can have a present (as Michael Oakeshott seems to deny)9 to discern thatQuentin Skinner did wisely to employ an imperfect continuous tense. In Frencha future conditional perfect might have done duty, but to speak of "what anauthor would (turn out to) have done" is to look at a future (to us a past) fromthe standpoint of what he was doing, and is not quite identical with speaking,from the standpoint of our present, of "what he has done" or (pace Oakeshott)"is doing." It is not clear whether an author's action is ever over and done with;but it is clear — and the use of the future conditional underlines it — that we havebegun to concern ourselves with the author's indirect action, his posthumousaction, his action mediated through a chain of subsequent actors. Such is thenecessary consequence of admitting the context to parity with the action, thelangue to parity with the parole.

It has been said in objection to Skinner's position that an author's words arenot his own, that the language he uses to effect his intentions may be taken fromhim and used by others to other effects. To some extent, this is inherent in thenature of language itself. The language he employs is already in use; it has beenused and is being used to utter intentions other than his. At this point an authoris himself both the expropriator, taking language from others and using it to hispurposes, and the innovator, acting upon language so as to induce momentary orlasting change in the ways in which it is used. But as he has done to others andtheir language, so shall it be done to him and his. The changes he has sought tobring about in the linguistic conventions surrounding him may not prevent lan-guage continuing to be used in the conventional ways he has sought to modify,and this may be enough to nullify or distort the effects of his utterance. Further-more, even when an author has succeeded in innovating, that is, in utteringspeech in such a way as to compel others to respond to it in some sense nothitherto conventional, it does not follow that he will succeed in ruling the re-sponses of others. They may — they usually will — impute to his utterance andhis innovation consequences, implications, and entailments he may not have in-tended or wish to acknowledge, and they will respond to him in terms deter-mined by these imputations, maintaining or modifying those conventions of speech

9Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford, 1983), and the present writer's review,(London) Times Literary Supplement, October 21 , 1983, p. 1,155.


they see as directly or indirectly affected by his real or imputed utterance. Andso far we are imagining only the actions of respondents contemporary with theauthor, that is, inhabiting the same linguistic and historical context. Languagesdisplay continuity as well as change; even when modified by their use in specificcontexts, they outlive the contexts in which they have been modified, and theyimpose upon actors in subsequent contexts the constraints to which innovationand modification are the necessary but unpredictable responses. The text, fur-thermore, preserves the utterances of the author in a rigid, literal form and con-veys them into subsequent contexts, where they compel from respondents inter-pretations that, however radical, distorting, and anachronistic, would not havebeen performed if the text had not performed upon the respondents. What anauthor "was doing," therefore, includes evoking from others responses the authorcould not control or predict, some of which would be performed in contexts quiteother than those in which he was doing that which he could possibly know hewas doing. Skinner's formula defines a moment in the history of the interactionsof parole with langue, but at the same time it defines that moment as open-ended.

II

A review of the state of the art must at this point present an account of itspractice. To describe is not to prescribe, and what follows is an account of somepractices the historian of political discourse will find himself10 pursuing, ratherthan a rigorous injunction to follow them in their order. In the perspective sug-gested here, however, it seems a prior necessity to establish the language orlanguages in which some passage of political discourse was being conducted.These "languages" will in strict fact have been sublanguages, idioms, and rhet-orics, rather than languages in the ethnic sense, although in early modern historyit is not uncommon to encounter polyglot texts that combine vernacular withLatin, Greek, and even Hebrew; we will chiefly be concerned with idioms ormodes of speech existing within a given vernacular. Those languages will vary inthe degree of their autonomy and stability. From "idioms" they shade off in thedirection of "styles" and toward a point where the distinction drawn here betweenlangue and parole may be lost; but we are typically in search of modes of discoursestable enough to be available for the use of more than one discussant and topresent the character of games defined by a structure of rules for more than oneplayer. This will enable us to consider how the players exploited the rules against

10The English language contains no third-person pronoun without gender. In writing of the authorsin the history of political discourse, most of whom were men, I am unembarrassed to find myselfusing the masculine pronoun, but when it comes to the authors o/that history, a host of distin-guished names occurs to remind me that it might just as well have been the feminine.

8 VIRTUE,.COMMERCE, AND.HISTORY

one another, and in due course how they performed upon the rules with the effectof altering them.

These idioms or language games vary also in origin and hence in content andcharacter. Some will have originated in the institutional practices of the societyconcerned: as the professional vocabularies of jurists, theologians, philosophers,merchants, and so on that for some reason have become recognized as part of thepractice of politics and have entered into political discourse. A great deal may belearned about the political culture of a given society at various moments in itshistory by observing what languages originating in this way have become ac-credited, as it were, to take part in its public speech, and what clerisies or profes-sions have acquired authority in the conduct of its discourse. But other languageswill be encountered whose character is rhetorical rather than institutional; theywill be found to have originated as modes of argument within the ongoing pro-cess of political discourse, as new modes invented or old modes transformed bythe constant action of speech upon language, of parole upon langue. There may beless need to look outside the continuum of discourse in search of their origins;equally, there is nothing to prevent languages of the former category, originatingoutside the mainstream of discourse, from having entered into the process oftransformation just described and from having undergone the mutations thatengender new idioms and modes of argument. From all this it follows that thegeneralized language of discourse at any given time — though perhaps this isparticularly true of early modern Europe and Britain — may possess a rich andcomplex texture; a wide variety of idioms may have entered into it and may beinteracting with one another to produce a complex history.

Each of these languages, however it originated, will exert the kind of forcethat has been called paradigmatic (though it has not proved economical to laborthe refinements of this term). That is to say, each will present information selec-tively as relevant to the conduct and character of politics, and it will encouragethe definition of political problems and values in certain ways and not in others.Each will therefore favor certain distributions of priority and consequently ofauthority; should a concept of authority itself be under discussion - as is likelyto be the case in political discourse — it will present "authority" as arising in acertain way and possessing a certain character, and not otherwise. However, oncewe have defined political discourse as drawing on a number of diversely originat-ing "languages" and arguments, we are committed to supposing the presence ofa number of these paradigmatic structures, distributing and defining authorityin a number of variant ways, at any one time. From this it follows — what is inany case almost self-evident - that political language is by its nature ambivalent;it consists in the utterance of what have been called "essentially contested con-cepts" and propositions,11 and in the simultaneous employment of languages11 For this term, advanced by W. B. Gallie in 1956, see William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political

Discourse, 2d ed. (Princeton, N . J . , 1983).


favoring the utterance of diverse and contrary propositions. But it further follows- what is nearly but not quite the same thing - that any text or simpler utterancein a sophisticated political discourse is by its nature polyvalent; it consists in theemployment of a texture of languages capable of saying different things and offavoring different ways of saying things, in the exploitation of these differencesin rhetoric and practice, and in their exploration and possibly their resolution incriticism and theory. When a diversity of such languages is to be found in a giventext, it may follow that a given utterance is capable of being intended and read,and so of performing, in more than one of them at the same time; nor is it at allimpossible that a given pattern of speech may migrate, or be translated, from onelanguage to another found in the same text, bearing implications from the formercontext and engrafting them among those belonging to the latter. And the authormay move among these patterns of poly valence, employing and recombiningthem according to the measure of his capacity. What to one investigator lookslike the generation of linguistic muddles and misunderstandings may look toanother like the generation of rhetoric, literature, and the history of discourse.

It is a large part of our historian's practice to learn to read and recognize thediverse idioms of political discourse as they were available in the culture and atthe time he is studying: to identify them as they appear in the linguistic textureof any one text, and to know what they would ordinarily have enabled that text'sauthor to propound or "say." The extent to which the author's employment ofthem was out of the ordinary comes later. The historian pursues his first goal byreading extensively in the literature of the time and by sensitizing himself to thepresence of diverse idioms. To some extent, therefore, his learning process is oneof familiarization, but he cannot remain merely passive and receptive to the lan-guage (or languages) he reads, and must frequently employ detective proceduresthat enable him to frame and validate hypotheses asserting that such and such alanguage was being employed and was capable of being employed in such andsuch ways. Along this line he must inevitably confront the problems of interpre-tation, ideological bias, and the hermeneutic circle. What evidence has he for thepresence of a language in the texts before him other than his own ingenuity inreading it into them? Is he not programmed by emphases arising from his ownculture to detect similar emphases in the literature of the past and devise suppos-ititious "languages" in which these were allegedly expressed? Can he proceedfrom saying that he has read a certain language in the texts of a past culture tosaying that this language existed as a resource available to those performing actsof utterance in that culture?

The historian is characteristically interested in the performances of agents otherthan himself and does not desire to be the author of his own past so much as touncover the doings of other authors in and of it. This is probably a reason whyhis politics are inherently liberal rather than aimed at praxis. In the kind ofinquiry under examination here, the historian is less interested in the "style," or


mode of utterance of a given author, than in the "language," or mode of utteranceavailable to a number of authors for a number of purposes, and his evidence forholding that such and such a "language" existed as a cultural resource for actorsin history, and not merely as a gleam in his interpretative eye, tends to be relatedto the number of actors he can show to have performed in this medium and thenumber of acts he can show them to have performed. The more he can show (a)that diverse authors employed the same idiom and performed diverse and evencontrary utterances in it, (b) that the idiom recurs in texts and contexts varyingfrom those in which it was at first detected, and (c) that authors expressed inwords their consciousness that they were employing such an idiom and developedcritical and second-order languages to comment on and regulate their employ-ment of it, the more his confidence in his method will increase. Logically, per-haps, he cannot prove that the whole mass of evidence he presents is not the fruitof his ingenuity as an interpreter, but neither can he prove that he is not asleepand dreaming the whole of his apparent existence. The greater the number anddiversity of performances he can narrate, the more the hypotheses erected by thosewho seek to imprison him within the hermeneutic circle must come to resemblea Ptolemaic universe, consisting of more cycles and epicycles than would satisfythe reasonable mind of Alfonso the Wise; in short, the more it will exhibit thedisadvantages of nonrefutability.

The problem of interpretation recurs in a more pressing form when we considerthat the historian studies languages in order to read them, but not to speak orwrite them. His own writings will not be constructed in a pastiche of the variousidioms they interpret, but rather in language he has devised in order to describeand explicate the workings of these idioms. If in Collingwoodian terminology hehas learned to "rethink the thoughts" of others, the language in which he reiter-ates their utterances will not be that used by them, but his own. It will beexplicatory in the sense that it aims constantly to render the implicit explicit, tobring to light assumptions on which the language of others has rested, to pursueand verbalize implications and intimations that in the original may have re-mained unspoken, to point out conventions and regularities that indicate whatcould and could not be spoken in the language, and in what ways the languagequa paradigm encouraged, obliged, or forbade its users to speak and think. Toquite an important extent, the historian's language will be hypothecatory andpredictive; it will enable him to state what he expects a conventional user of thelanguage under study to have said in specific circumstances, the better to studywhat was in fact said under these circumstances. When the prediction is falsifiedand the speech act performed is not that expected, it may be that the conventionsof language need further exploration; that the circumstances in which the lan-guage was used were other than the historian has supposed they were; that thelanguage being employed was not precisely the language he has expected; or, the


most interesting possibility of all, that innovation and change were taking placein the language.

It will be at such moments that the historian is most confident that he is notmerely the prisoner of his own interpretative ingenuity, but the fact remains thathis writings about the language of others will be conducted largely in a paralan-guage or metalanguage, designed to explicate the implicit and present the historyof a discourse as a kind of dialogue between its intimations and potentialities, inwhich what was not always spoken will be spoken by him. It does not make thehistorian an idealist to say that he regularly, though not invariably, presents thelanguage in the form of an ideal type: a model by means of which he carries onexplorations and experiments. Since he is ultimately concerned with the perfor-mances of agents other than himself, he is constantly alert for occasions on whichthe explication of language has been carried out by actors in the history he isstudying; by the language's own users commenting upon its use critically, reflec-tively, and by means of second-order languages developed among them for thepurpose. These will be occasions on which the actors passed from simple discourseto discourse continued and modified by means including theory, but they willalso be occasions that provide the historian with information enabling him tocontrol his former hypotheses and construct new ones. The explication of thelanguages he has learned to read is his means of pursuing his inquiries simulta-neously in two directions: toward the contexts in which language was uttered,and toward the acts of speech and utterance performed in and upon the contextfurnished by language itself and the further contexts in which it was situated. Hewill seek next to observe the parole performing upon the langue: upon the conven-tions and implications of the language, upon other actors as users of the language,upon actors in any further contexts of whose existence he may become persuaded,and possibly upon those contexts themselves. Language, as we have been usingthe term, is the historian's key to both speech act and context.

We have seen that the texts he studies may prove to have been compounded ofmany idioms and languages. The historian is constantly surprised and delightedto discover familiar languages in texts equally familiar, where they have not beennoticed before - the language of prophetic exegesis in Leviathan,u the idiom ofdenouncing paper credit in Reflections on the Revolution in France13 - though mak-ing these discoveries does not always enhance his respect for previous scholarship.But if a proposition derives its validity from the language in which it is per-formed, and part at least of its historicity from its performance upon the same

12 "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in The Diversity of History:Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield, ed. J. H. Elliott and H. G. Konigsberger (London andIthaca, N .Y. , 1970) and reprinted in J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays in PoliticalThought and History (New York, 1971).

13See chap. 10, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution."


language, it follows that a text compounded of many languages may not only saymany things in as many ways, but also may be a means of action in as manyhistories; it may be broken down into many acts performed in the history of asmany languages as there are in the text. To recognize this will commit the his-torian to some radical, though not always irreversible, experiments in deconstruc-tion, but before he can pursue these or examine their implications, he needsmeans of understanding how an act of speech, utterance, or authorship, per-formed in a certain language, may perform and innovate upon it. His attentionnow turns from langue to parole, to the act performed in and on a context; but aknowledge of the context remains necessary to a knowledge of the innovation.

Ill

Each of the distinguishable idioms of which a text may be compounded is acontext in its own right: a way of speaking that seeks to prescribe what thingsmay be said in it and that precedes and may outlast the speech act performedwithin its prescriptions. We expect it to be complex and sophisticated, to havebeen formed over time under pressure from a great many conventions and contin-gencies entering into combination, and to contain at least some elements of asecond-order speech that permits its users to reflect on the implications of theiruse of it. The process of "learning" it, which has just been described, may there-fore be thought of as a process of learning its characteristics, resources, and lim-itations as a mode of utterance which facilitates the performance of some kindsof speech act and inhibits the performance of others; any act performed in it maybe viewed as exploiting, exploring, recombining, and challenging the possibili-ties of utterance of which it consists. But language is referential and has a varietyof subjects; it alludes to those elements of experience out of which it has comeand with which it offers to deal, and a language current in the public speech ofan institutional and political society may be expected to allude to those institu-tions, authorities, value symbols, and recollected events that it presents as partof that society's politics and from which it derives much of its own character. A"language" in our specialized sense, then, is not only a prescribed way of speak-ing, but also a prescribed subject matter for political speech. We have reached apoint where we can see that each language context betokens a political, social, orhistorical context within which it is itself situated; we are obliged at the samepoint, however, to acknowledge that each language to some degree selects andprescribes the context within which it is to be recognized.

Given that any such language has taken time to form, it must display a his-torical dimension; it must possess and prescribe a past made up of those socialarrangements, historical events, recognized values, and ways of thinking of whichit has been able to speak; it discourses of a politics from which the character of


pastness cannot be altogether separated. The historian therefore cannot easilysatisfy the demand, often made of him, that he present acts of political speech asdetermined (in the terminology criticized by Oakeshott) by the "primordial"demands of a "present of practical action";14 because language characterizes thepresent in speech loaded with intimations of a past, the present is difficult toisolate or to state in immediate practical purity. Political speech is of coursepractical and informed by present necessities, but it is none the less constantlyengaged in a struggle to discover what the present necessities of practice are, andthe most powerful minds using it are exploring the tension between establishedlinguistic usages and the need to use words in new ways. The historian has hisown relation to this tension. He knows what norms the language he is studyingusually implied, but he may also possess independent knowledge that these normsand the society they presupposed were changing, in ways and for reasons thelanguage as yet lacked means of recognizing. He will therefore look for indica-tions that words were being used in new ways as the result of new experiences,and were occasioning new problems and possibilities in the discourse of the lan-guage under study. It will be a problem for him, however, that nothing in thatlanguage denotes changes in its historical context as satisfactorily as does thelanguage available to him as a historian, but not available to the actors whoselanguage and history he is studying. Faced with problems such as how far he mayuse twentieth-century categories to explain the categories used in the seventeenthcentury, he may impose on himself the discipline of explaining only how changesin seventeenth-century language indicated changes in the historical context, whatchanges were indicated, and what changes occurred in the ways of indicatingthem. Since the language of seventeenth-century actors responded differently toits historical context from the language he himself uses, it may be long beforeseventeenth-century speech, interpreted in context, gives him occasion to use thecategories of historical explanation he would wish to use — and in some cases thatoccasion may never arise. But the historian of discourse cannot get out of a lan-guage that which was never in it.

The present of practical necessity in which past actors found themselves is notimmediately accessible, since it must come to us through the mediation of thelanguage they used; but this does not mean that it is not accessible at all. Fromthe texts they wrote, from our knowledge of the language they used, the com-munities of debate to which they belonged, the programs of action that were putinto effect, and the history of the period at large, it is often possible to formulatehypotheses concerning the necessities they were under and the strategies theydesired to carry out, and to test these by using them to interpret the intentionsand performances of the texts themselves. We are in search, however, less of the

14 See n. 9, this chapter.


text's "practical" than of its discursive performance. No one has tried to identifythe thousand gentlemen whose minds Hobbes once claimed15 to have framed toa conscientious obedience to the government of the Commonwealth, nor wouldit tell us much about Leviathan to know if they existed. We do not much care toknow whether the first readers of // Principe (whoever they were) were moved toaccept or reject the legitimacy of rule by the restored Medici, especially as thework seems capable of operating either way; what matters to us is to study thedifferences that // Principe and Leviathan made to the premises on which politicaldiscourse was conducted. This is to say, of course, that we are historians of dis-course, not of behavior, but it is also to read Machiavelli and Hobbes as theywere read by everyone whose response to them we possess in written form; theseresponses are, without exception, concerned not with their practical politicalconsequences, but with the challenges they present to the normal structures ofdiscourse. The history of discourse is not our arbitrary selection; it declares itselfin the literature.

The performance of the text is its performance as parole in a context of langue.It may simply continue the operative conventions of which the language consists;it may serve to indicate to us that the language was continuing to be used in aworld that was changing and had begun to change it; or it may perform on aswell as in the language that is its medium, innovating in ways that bring aboutgreater or smaller, more or less radical changes in the use of the language or ofsecond-order language about it. (I am writing here, for simplicity's sake, as if eachtext were written in only one of the available languages of discourse, instead ofbeing compounded of several.) The historian therefore needs a means of under-standing how a speech act is performed within a language context, and in partic-ular how it is performed and innovates upon it.

When an author has performed an act of this character, we are accustomed tosay that he has "made a move." The phrase implies game playing and tacticalmaneuver, and our understanding of "what he was doing" when he made hismove thus depends in considerable measure on our understanding of the practicalsituation he was in, of the case he desired to argue, the action or norm he desiredto legitimate or delegitimate, and so on; we hope that his text will indicate sucha situation, one of which we have some independent knowledge from other sources.The practical situation will include pressures, constraints, and encouragementsthe author was under or perceived himself as being under, arising from the pref-erences and antipathies of others and the limitations and opportunities of a polit-ical context as he perceived or experienced it; it is obviously possible, but notobviously necessary, that this situation will extend as far as the relations betweensocial classes. But the practical situation also includes the linguistic situation:15 Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics . . . (1656); see William Molesworth,

ed., The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 11 vols. (London, 1845), vol. 7, pp. 335-6 , 343-7 .


that arising from the constraints and opportunities imposed on the author by thelanguage or languages available for him to use, and it is often — perhaps predom-inantly - within this context (or sector of the context) that the historian of dis-course sees the author's "move" performed. Languages are the objects as well asthe instruments of consciousness, and the public speech of a society commonlyincludes second-order languages in which the actors comment upon the languagesthey are otherwise using. To the extent to which this happens, language is objec-tified as part of the practical situation, and an author "making a move" in re-sponse to some practical necessity may not merely be using some language in anew way, but proposing that it be used in a new way and commenting on thelanguage uses of his society, or even on the character of language itself. It is atthis point that the historian of discourse must see philosophy and practice ascoexisting rather than as separable: Hobbes or Locke as both philosopher andpamphleteer.

Whatever the idiom or language in which the "move" was performed, what-ever the level of consciousness it presupposed, whatever the combination of rhet-oric and theory, practice and philosophy it seems to have entailed, the historianlooks for ways in which it may have rearranged, or sought to rearrange, thepossibilities of language open to the author and his co-users of language; anyresult of this order that the historian can obtain will furnish a large part of hisanswer to the question of what the author was doing. In order to obtain knowl-edge of how a speech act may modify or innovate upon the language it is per-formed in, it is probably best to begin with utterances at a relatively simplepractical, rhetorical, or argumentative level; it also seems best, however, to bearin mind that the act may be performed in a context compounded of several lan-guages simultaneously in use (whether these be thought of as first-order lan-guages interacting with each other or second-order languages interacting withthose on which they comment). If we wish to imagine a speech act innovatingwithin and upon a single idiom unconnected with others — and it may be neces-sary to do so — we must imagine it performing or proposing a change in one ofthe usages in which that idiom consists: a drastic reversal, perhaps, in the mean-ing of a key term. But a change confined to a single idiom can reverse only theusages already there, and we shall find ourselves imagining such simple but far-reaching moves as a reversal of value signs: a proposal that what was formerlyconsidered bad be now considered good, or vice versa. Of this adikos logos thereare some notorious examples in our histories, though their shock effect is usuallyenough to give rise instantly to second-order language, increasing the number ofidioms in use.

We may at this stage turn to the context of experience, rather than of lan-guage, and suppose some term in a single idiom, familiarly used to denote somecomponent of experience, being used to denote an unfamiliar component, or to


associate the familiar with an unfamiliar component, or more generally to speakof the familiar in an unfamiliar way. Once we have introduced the context (andconcept) of experience, we must concede that such innovations may be thoughtof either as "moves" deliberately performed,16 or as changes in usage comingabout in ways of which the author was more or less unconscious and that indeedtook an indefinite number of speech acts to perform; there are wide twilight areasto explore here. On the other hand, once we reintroduce the concept of second-order language — which is likely to introduce itself whenever an actor becomesconscious that a move is being performed — we have reentered the realm in whichlanguage conveys consciousness of its own existence and comes to consist of anumber of concurrent idioms, from which coexisting first-order languages can-not, as we have seen, be excluded. The context of language reasserts itself andinteracts with increasing complexity with the context of experience.

The historian now embarks on a search for ways in which a speech act mayinnovate in and on a context consisting of several languages in interaction — or,more brutally, how it may innovate in several languages at once. "Moves" of thiskind will be moves of translation, passing directly or indirectly from one availablelanguage to another. A crucial term, topos, or pattern of utterance may be trans-lated from the context of one idiom to that of another; that is, it may be simplyremoved into a new context and left to undergo modification there. A problemor subject normally considered by applying one idiom may be considered byapplying another, and this may carry the implication, subsequently explicated,that it belongs to a context of experience different from that to which it haspreviously been assigned. The richer the diversity of idioms or languages of whicha public discourse is composed, the more various, complex, and subtle the "moves"of this kind that can be performed. These moves may be rhetorical and implicit,performed without advertisement, and left to work their effects, or they may beexplicit and theoretical, explained and justified in some critical language designedto vindicate and elaborate their character; and the use of second-order languageis known to set off an escalation with few if any upper limits. All the resourcesof rhetoric, of criticism, of methodology, of epistemology, and of metaphysicsare therefore in principle at the disposal of the sophisticated performer in the fieldof multilingual discourse; if they are not immediately available to him he hasmeans and motivation to set about inventing them for himself. There is an ex-ponential progress toward — though it is a matter of historical contingency whetherthere is ultimately attained - the appearance of the fully self-conscious linguisticperformer, the "epic theorist" depicted by Sheldon Wolin,17 who seeks to expli-

16A striking, not to say flagrant, example is James Madison's announcement in the tenth of theFederalist Papers that the word "republic" denoted a state governed by representatives of the citizens,whereas one governed by the citizens themselves was a "democracy." The force of Madison's state-ment was retrospective, not enactive; he declared that this was, not that it should be, normal usage.

17Sheldon S. Wolin, "Political Theory as a Vocation," American Political Science Review LXIII, 4


cate and justify all his moves and innovations, and to propose a radical reorderingof language and philosophy. Such beings appear from time to time in the histor-ical record; Hobbes was one, though Machiavelli probably was not.

This does not mean that the epic theorist's performance is not historicallyconditioned, only that it is self-elaborating without immediately apparent limit.It now becomes a major problem for the historian to distinguish between whatthe author might have done and what in fact he did, since even the epic theorist'scapability does not in every case imply intent. But we have reached a point whereit seems improbable that the historian's understanding will be advanced throughconstructing a typology of moves that may in principle be performed or innova-tions that may be effected; the possible variations seem too diverse to be econom-ically classified, though useful theoretical work may still be done in this direc-tion. The historian is likely to proceed through the location of the author's textsin their contexts; through weighing what he might have done against what hedid, the historian attempts an exhaustive explication of the moves he performed,the innovations he effected, and the messages about experience and language hecan be shown to have transmitted. This will constitute an account of "what hewas doing" insofar as these words can be confined to denoting the author's per-formances in writing his text.

IV

Agents perform upon other agents, who perform acts in response to theirs, andwhen action and response are performed through the medium of language, wecannot absolutely distinguish the author's performance from the reader's re-sponse. It is true that this is not invariably the case in the literature of politics.The author's manuscript may have lain in an archive for hundreds of years beforebeing published — as did Clarke's report of the Putney debates and most of theworks of Guicciardini — and with regard to the period before publication, wehave to think of the text as less a performance than a document, less an act18

than an indication that a certain state of consciousness, and of language usage,existed at an ascertainable time. We may indeed always arrest our study of thetext at the point where it indicates to us the state of the author's consciousnessand capacity to articulate it, and there are kinds of speech acts that are confinedto the expression and articulation of consciousness. An author may have beenwriting merely to and for himself, or writing private memoranda of thoughts hedesired to conceal from others; texts so written do not lose the character of his-torical actions performed by self-conscious agents. But speech is commonly pub-

(1969), pp. 1,062-82, and Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles, 1970). Forcomment, see John G. Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.,1979), pp. 5 1 - 7 , 136-59.

18"Less . . . than" does not mean "not . . . but."


lie, and authors commonly publish their works, though the act of writing a textand the act of publishing it may be very different because performed in differentsituations; Locke's Treatises of Government currently offer the most notorious in-stance of this. The history of discourse is concerned with speech acts that becomeknown and evoke response, with illocutions that are modified as they becomeperlocutions by the ways in which recipients respond to them, and with responsesthat take the form of further speech acts and countertexts. The reader himselfbecomes an author, and a complex mode of Rezeptionsgeschkhte is required of thehistorian.

We are at a point where the history of discourse diverges from the history ofconsciousness. We have the author's text, a cultural artifact inscribed with acertain finality, and by setting this in the contexts furnished by his language andexperience, we can say what it was that he "did" down to the moment of hiscompleting it (or publishing it if he got so far); we can estimate his intention andperformance, his moves and innovations, as they stood at that moment, and statewhat he "had been doing" to that point. But to ask what he "was doing" is toemploy the imperfect tense and ask an open-ended question; there are answers wehave not given and cannot give until we know what the author did to others andto the languages in which he and others conducted their discourse. In order toknow this, we must have acts of discourse performed by others in response to his,and in particular to the innovations in language that his acts had performed orbegun to perform; we must know what changes in their discourse occurred asthey responded to his utterances and performed countermoves to his moves. Atthis point we move from author to reader, but to reader considered as author; forunless they were performed in the medium — written and published speech —that the author himself employed, the reader's responses have nothing to tell us.There are two reasons for this, or rather there are two senses in which this is true.It is true that we are compelled to work only with the evidence that has survivedfor us to use, so that responses to a text that were never verbalized, or verbalizedonly in unrecorded spoken words, are virtually impossible to recapture. It is alsotrue that an author who worked in a written medium may be thought of asworking on that medium, as intending to modify the things that could be saidand done in it; so that changes he induced in the performances of other writersin that medium may indeed be the changes he intended and performed, or (if atvariance with his intentions) performed without intending. We need not there-fore apologize for the unrepresentative elitism of studying only those readerswhose responses were verbalized, recorded, and presented. The mentalite of thesilent and inarticulate majority should indeed be sought after and if possiblerecovered; it may have important information for us. But the history otmentalitesis not identical with the history of discourse.

The historian begins now to focus on other texts, written and published by


those who had read the text considered in the first instance and who were re-sponding directly or indirectly to it. His chief need is for an understanding ofhow the previous author's innovations, singled out from among the rest of hisspeech acts, may impose themselves on readers in such a way as to force fromthem responses congruent with the innovation. He begins by presupposing thatan utterance acts upon the consciousness of its recipient, that what is read cannotbe unread. There is something unilateral about the act of communication,19 whichdoes not take place wholly between consenting adults. By speaking words in yourhearing, by injecting script, print, or image into your field of attention, I imposeon you, without your consent, information you cannot ignore. I have demandedyour response, and I have also sought to determine it. I have indeed determinedthat it is to an act of mine and to information introduced by me that you mustrespond, and the more complex and intelligible the information imposed by thisact of verbal rape — this penetration of your consciousness without your consent— the more I have tried to determine what your response shall be. It is true thatif we have shared a medium of communication consisting in a structure of sharedconventions, you have more of the freedom that comes of prior consent to theform my acts took; but for this very reason, any challenge or innovation posed byme to those conventions will be hard for you to resist recognizing, and you willhave to respond to that innovation as you recognize and understand it. Nor is itlikely (unless you are a Stalinist bureaucrat) that you will be able to respondsimply by reiterating the existing conventions of discourse as if I had never chal-lenged them; such attempts are of course made and sometimes succeed, but theyfail in proportion to your awareness that I have said something you wish toanswer. You are more likely to respond to my move with a countermove of yourown, and even if the countermove is intended to restore the conventions I chal-lenged, it will contain and register your awareness that I have said somethingunprecedented and will to that extent contain something unprecedented of itsown. To my injection of new wine you will respond by presenting old wine innew bottles. What I "was doing" includes obliging you to do something, andpartly determining what that shall be.

But language provides you with resources for determining your own response.If there is a master-slave relationship between us, you may respond in languagethat accepts and perpetuates my language's manipulation of you;20 but suchrelationships are neither simple nor stable, and your understanding of the slave's

19 For more on this, see Pocock, "Verbalising a Political Act: towards a Politics of Language," PoliticalTheory I, 1 (1973), pp. 27-45, and "Political Ideas as Historical Events: Political Philosophers asHistorical Actors," in Political Theory and Political Education, ed. Melvin Richter (Princeton, N.J.,1980).

20For the language of the literature of absolutism, and comment on its manipulative strategies withreference to the present writer's theories, see Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature:Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore, 1983).


role may not coincide with mine, so that even the servility of your response willbe troubling to me and will pervert my language (the literature of slavery islargely about this). The more your language, shared with me, permits you toarticulate your perception of the world, the more the conventions and paradigmsit contains will permit you to assimilate my speech and deflect my innovations- although, paradoxically, these may also be the means of emphasizing anddramatizing my innovations and rendering them nonignorable. And once youbegin verbalizing your response to my utterance, you begin to acquire the free-dom to maneuver that arises from what Stanley Fish has termed "the infinitecapacity of language for being appropriated."21 The interpreter and counterau-thor begins to "read" the text, taking the words and speech acts it contains tohimself and reiterating them in ways and in contexts of his own selection, so thatthey become incorporated into speech acts of his own. In presenting this process,we tend to speak of author and reader as if they were in an adversary relation, butthe process is essentially the same when the relation is that of instructor anddisciple, to say nothing of master and slave. The reader acquires a capacity toperform "moves" not at all unlike the "moves" we saw being performed by theauthor, whether or not these are thought of as countermoves to the author'sinnovations; the resources of rhetoric, argument, and criticism become his as theyare those of any other language agent. He can alter the meaning of terms, removethem from one idiomatic context into another, select and rearrange the order ofthe various idioms out of which the author compounded his text, and alter theelements of the context of experience to which the components of discourse aretaken to be referring. In short, any and all of the speech acts the text has beenperforming can be reperformed by the reader in ways nonidentical with those inwhich the author intended and performed them; they can also become the occa-sion for the performance of new speech acts by the reader as he becomes an authorin his turn. In this matrix, it is easy to see how innovation by the author can be- as we have already seen why it must be - met with counterinnovation by therespondent. There is even a sense in which the respondent — let us imagine hima disciple — cannot escape treating the text in this way, since not being the authorhe cannot use the author's language exactly as the author did; and should therespondent be confronted with a text whose author has been dead for centuries,he inevitably acquires the freedom to interpret it in a historical context that theauthor did not imagine and a language context that includes idioms he neverknew.

The history of discourse now becomes visible as one of traditio in the sense oftransmission and, still more, translation. Texts composed of langues and paroles,of stable language structures and the speech acts and innovations that modify2Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge,

Mass., 1980), p. 305.


them, are transmitted and reiterated, and their components are severally trans-mitted and reiterated, first by nonidentical actors in shared historical contexts,and then by actors in historically discrete contexts. Their history is, first, that ofthe constant adaptation, translation, and reperformance of the text in a successionof contexts by a succession of agents, and second, and under closer inspection,that of the innovations and modifications performed in as many distinguishableidioms as originally were compounded to form the text and subsequently formedthe succession of language contexts in which the text was interpreted. What theauthor "is doing," therefore, turns out to have been continuing and modifying —either more or less drastically, radically, and "originally" - the performance ofan indefinite diversity of speech acts in an indefinite diversity of contexts, bothof language and of historical experience. It is, on the face of it, unlikely that allthese histories can be circumscribed in a single history. Italian usage may be wisein calling an author's posthumous history his fortuna, French in calling it histravail22

It now becomes important to decide whether and when we are to close off Skin-ner's open-ended context: to cease saying that an author "was doing" those thingsthat were performed by translation, modification, and discussion of a text origi-nally his. This apparently verbal question proves to entail the whole problem ofauthority and interpretation. Stanley Fish has argued that a text can be said toexert no authority over those who interpret it, but rather becomes dissolved inthe continuum of interpretation to which it once gave rise. The historian will notchallenge this as a normative proposition; interpreters may legitimately behavein the ways it presupposes, and the historian will not be at all surprised to findthem so behaving in history. But he will be no more surprised to find — indeedhe thinks he knows already — that human communities in history have sometimesascribed extraordinary and even divine authority to certain texts, have maintainedthem in stable textual forms for centuries and even millennia, and have discussedthe various ways in which they may be established and discussed subject to thepremise that they possess the authority ascribed to them.23 When this has hap-pened, there is a text in the historian's class, in the sense that he observes the

22Giuliano Procacci, Studi sulla Fortuna del Machiavelli (Rome, 1965); Claude Lefort, Le Travail deI'Oeuvre Machiavel (Paris, 1972).

23 Fish will of course argue that the ascription of authority is an interpretative act and that the textcan never be disentangled from the acts of those who ascribe authority to it. I agree with this, butI wish to maintain that (a) the text, persisting over time as an authoritative artifact, is among thedeterminants of those acts, and (b) the text may be, and in history often is, discerned as a complexof former ascriptions of authority, among which the author's own affirmation of authority for histext may possibly be one.


persistence of a literary artifact of a certain authority and duree, and he sets out toinvestigate the historical occurrences that have accompanied its persistence. Thereis an obvious contextual sense in which no application or interpretation of anauthoritative text is exactly like any other, because each is performed by a specificset of actors in (and on) a specific set of contingencies or circumstances; but thiswill not persuade the historian that the text has disappeared. If it is of the appro-priate character, the text may sustain the existence — or it may be enough to saythe appearance — of a certain set of formulas or paradigms, which are to beapplied each time the authority of the text is invoked. It may be, of course, thatthe principles require restating each time they are to be applied, and that everystatement of principle interacts with the statement of the case to which it is tobe applied. But the exegete may be linguistically capable of abstracting the prin-ciple and stating it in an ideal form each time he applies it, and it has beenclaimed for certain texts, over lengthy periods, that they do support principlesthat can be, and de facto have been, so stated. The historian notes that authori-tative texts vary in the extent to which this abstract rigor is claimed for them:The lex scripta differs from the lex non scripta, the Posterior Analytics from the /Ching (which appears to be an infinitely flexible operational matrix, for whichauthority is claimed on no other ground than that of its flexibility). In the lightof such facts, he will not be unduly interested in dissolving the principle into itsapplication, or in showing that the claim that it can be repeatedly abstracted andrestated is false; it is not his business to convict the actors in his history of falseconsciousness, until they begin so to convict one another.

The historian is now recognizing the persistence in certain historical sequencesof certain paradigms, institutionalized in certain texts. He recognizes that eachapplication of a paradigm is unique, and that no paradigm can be altogetherdetached from its application; nevertheless, it is part of the character of a para-digm as he is using the word that it can be sufficiently detached from its appli-cation to be stated, and to be discussed in second-order language. If this canhappen once, it can happen again, and you can step more than once into the samesecond-order river. To concede that this can happen more than once is to leaveopen for historical investigation the question of how many times it has happenedin certain historical sequences, that is, how long these sequences have maintaineda certain kind of continuity. It is certainly the case that the whole thrust and biasof his method, consisting as we have seen in the multiplication of agents, theiracts, and the contexts they have acted in, lead him to suppose that any paradigmwill be assimilated to contingency in a relatively moyenne duree; but should themoyenne duree turn out to have been relatively longue, he will feel surprised but notrefuted. The longevity of paradigms is not predetermined, and the history ofliterate discourse has lasted nearer two millennia than three in most cultureswhere it is found.


The text may have had an author, and the paradigms it has conveyed over timemay have been established in it by the intended performances of that author.Suppose — what we have seen to be improbable in most cases, but not impossiblein all - that (a) it has conveyed relatively stable paradigms over a long period oftime, and (b) these can be shown to have been continuous or congruent with -to have given effect to — intentions it can be said were those of the author. Isthere not a sense in which it may be claimed that the author's intentions havecontinued to exert authority over that period; that they have continued to beeffected; that the author "was doing" things long after his death? Clearly, theidiom of posthumous action must be partly figurative, but the figure may conveynothing more than that his intentions were being effected through the persistenceof his text and the actions of those who kept it in being and authoritative. Wemight be able to add that his own speech acts and textual performances played apart in inducing others to regard them as authoritative and maintain them inparadigmatic form. The statement that we are still being acted upon (dare onesay "influenced"?) by Plato, Confucius, Hegel, or Marx would then acquire some-thing like a verifiable meaning; it could be inquired into, and the outcome ofinquiry would not be predetermined.

VI

In enlarging the inquiry in the direction of these possibilities, I am of courseworking against the grain of a mode of investigation normally focused on themultiplicity of performances by a multiplicity of agents that discourse, includingthe persistence of texts, makes possible. To many critics this method seemsalarmingly deconstructive of texts, of philosophy, of traditions, and even of au-thors. Once an author has completed his text (and that text has survived), it maybe said that we possess it not merely as a matrix for the performance of diversespeech acts, but as a complex series of statements, perhaps extended over hundredsof printed pages, apparently produced by a single powerful mind concerned toargue at a high level of abstraction and organization, and therefore informed bythe rhetorical, logical, or methodical unity its author imposed on it. There nowappear students of the text whose concern is to discover the postulates or princi-ples — not immediately apparent to the reading eye but calling for techniques ofreconstitution — that endow the text with the unity it is presumed to have pos-sessed or pursued.24 If these students are concerned to recover the author's act orintention in endowing his text, or texts, with unity, they are asking a historicalquestion to which there may be found an answer, though it is also a historicalquestion whether the author had any such intention. It is one thing to be dealing24See Howard Warrender, "Political Theory and Historiography: A Reply to Professor Skinner,"

HistoricalJournal XXII, 4 (1979), pp. 931-40.


with Thomas Hobbes, who claimed from the outset of his publications to beembarked upon a philosophical enterprise of a specific kind, and another to bedealing with Edmund Burke, who delivered speeches and wrote pamphlets on avariety of occasions in the course of an active political life. The claim that thelatter's works are informed by conceptual and philosophical unity requires a dif-ferent sort of justification from the same claim with respect to the former. Notall the great intelligences who have engaged in political discourse have engaged,directly or indirectly, in systematic political theorizing.

If, on the other hand, students appear who are in search of a principle on whichthe text may be endowed with unity irrespective of whether the author can beshown to have intended to proceed on any such principle, these students mayhave ceased to regard the text as a problem in the reconstruction of performanceand may be looking at it only as a problem in conceptual resolution. If they saysimply that the text can be made sense of in such a way, and that it does notmatter to them whether the author or any previous reader has ever made sense ofit in such a way, they are informing us that their philosophical enterprise doesnot oblige them to study the actions of any historical agent; after which theyhave only to abstain — and it may not be easy — from inadvertently speaking asif they are after all describing the actions of historical agents and writing historywith the disengaged hand. To attend meetings of the Hume Society is to encoun-ter many statements made in the preceding mode, and with such clarity that theonly problem remaining is that of distinguishing between the word "Hume" usedto denote an actor in history and the word "Hume" used to denote an actor in aphilosophical scenario.

The historian invited to consider a text, or a corpus of texts, as a unified bodyof argument will ask by what acts, performed at what moments and in whatcontexts, the text was informed or endowed with the unity claimed for it; if hehears it asserted that there exists some postulate on which the text can be seen topossess such a unity, he will ask for information regarding the postulate's pres-ence and action in history. He may learn that it was present in the langue thatthe author of the text found himself using, or that it was asserted by the authoras he articulated his parole. In either case the historian will have returned thepostulate to the context furnished by speech act, language, and discourse, but hewill find himself asked by his interlocutor to consider the postulate in relation tothe various speech acts performed by the author over the period of time and inthe various contexts of speech action involved in the completion of the author'stext or texts. He is, in other words, being asked to consider the author perform-ing only those acts that were necessary to complete the text and endow it withwhatever unity it possesses, that is, the author acting upon the text and upon hisown perceptions and performances in effecting it. At this stage the historian willask for evidence that the author both intended the production of a coherent text


and understood what would constitute its coherence. Since the historian is self-trained to think of political speech as multilingual and polyvalent, he will wantto be assured that the author had both the will and the means to organize his textas a single coherent parole; and since he is also self-trained to think of actions andperceptions as performed at discrete moments in time, he will want to know atwhat moments the author saw himself as organizing his text on the basis of thepostulate alleged. Did the author establish the postulate as defining his intentionsat the outset of his work? Did he come to see that there was such a postulate, andthat he was giving effect to it, only as his work proceeded? Did he discover thathe had organized his work on the basis of such a postulate only when his textswere complete and he viewed them in retrospect?25 Any of these questions maybe answered affirmatively, and they may be answered in various combinations;but the historian wants to be assured not only that they can be answered, butalso that they are the right questions to ask about the text before him.

Let us now suppose that all these questions have been satisfactorily answered:that the author has been shown to have intended and effected the production ofa body of writing systematically in accord with the postulates on which he inten-tionally based it. The latest moment at which he could have intended and effectedthis was the moment of completing the text, but at that moment, and down toit, the author has been considered only as in dialogue with his text and himself.We may have considered his interactions with the "languages" in which he wrotethe text, and with other texts and authors to whom he responded in writing it;nevertheless, to ask about an author's performance in investing his text withunity is to ask about his performance in and upon his text and nothing more.What he "intended," what he "was doing," was closed off at the moment whenthe text was completed, and it is as if - it will help us greatly if it is the casethat — the text can be considered a purely solitary act, an articulation of theauthor's consciousness and nothing more, a dialogue with himself and no oneelse. Let us suppose this to be the case: that the text lay undiscovered in a drawerand was read by no one for hundreds of years, until it was unearthed and pub-lished (such cases are rare but not unknown). We should then study it as asoliloquy or memorandum: a communication with the author's self. In the event,it does not cease to be an act but, in ceasing to be an act of communication withanother, it becomes rather the record of a state, an indication that at a particulartime the state of language permitted the articulation of particular states of con-sciousness. We do not simply pass from a private to a public language, becausethere are highly private writings by intensely solitary men - Guicciardini's worksoffer some examples — couched in highly public and rhetorical language, andalthough uncommunicated writings cannot be said to have changed language,25 If so, "what he was (had been) doing" was a question the historian himself found it necessary to

ask.


there is no reason why they should not be said to have indicated that it waschanging. Solilocutive writing does not depart from the history of discourse, butoccupies a very special place within it; there is indeed a sense in which the morethe text performs the function of expression or reflection, the more it enables usto look away from the history of speech and toward the history of thought. Sincethe study of political literature in history has been based on the paradigm ofphilosophy rather than of rhetoric, we have been accustomed to treat texts asphilosophy: to isolate them as expressions of their authors' consciousness and toexplore the states of consciousness they articulate. Since a great many texts arephilosophical and were composed with that end in view, and since it is legitimateand valuable to treat almost any text as articulating a state of mind rather thanas performing an act of communication, this method has been and will continueto be practiced to the improvement of our understanding. The demand that everytext be considered, exclusively or primarily, as contributory to political action is,quite simply, wrong; perhaps it only seems to have been put forward.26

Yet authors communicate their articulations of consciousness. Not only hasphilosophy since its beginnings been as much dialogic as solilocutive, but phi-losophers, having completed texts of so great complexity that we can read andanalyze them only as self-contained, carry them to the copyist or the printer andlet them loose on publics whose size and membership they cannot for long con-trol; and there have been intensely solitary writers, seemingly concerned onlywith the self's introspection upon the self, who have not only caused their med-itations to be printed but have done so with political as well as philosophicalintentions. For one Guicciardini we can find a Montaigne, a La Rochefoucauld,a Rousseau;27 even Guicciardini may have meant to communicate with otherGuicciardini. At this point our study of the act of speech must become a studyof the act of publication, which is not quite identical with it; for as we have seen,writing not intended for publication may be couched in public language and mayeven perform moves and make innovations within it. The act of publication en-sures that these innovations will become known to others, but may initially at-tempt to control or limit who these shall be. The author who acts to procure alimited circulation for his writings is trying to delimit his "public"; one whocommissions a printer to expose his works for sale on the market is not. Caseshave been reported of authors whose works are written in "twofold" language,conveying an exoteric message to an open readership and at the same time anesoteric message to a closed one. We may even examine the case of an author who26See Richard Ashcraft, "On the Problem of Methodology and the Nature of Political Theory,"

Political Theory III, 1 (1975), pp. 5-25, esp. 17-20; discussed in Mark Goldie, "Obligations,Utopias, and their Historical Context," HistoricalJournal XXVI, 3 (1983), pp. 727-46.

27See Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J., 1980). She character-izes as "individualism" that introspective mode of political thinking that is concerned with theidentity and awareness of the self in political society.


withheld part of his works from publication and wonder what he "intended" bythis act of noncommunication or disinformation, as David Wootton has latelydone with the secret and irreligious jottings of Paolo Sarpi (but how did theycome to be copied?).28

Closed-circuit publication and "secret writing" notwithstanding, the act ofcommunication exposes one's writings to readers who will interpret them fromstandpoints not one's own, and the act of publication in the normal sense of"going public" abandons the attempt to determine who these readers shall be,while attempting to maximize the number of those on whom one's writings shallperform. It might be said, therefore, that publication as the attempt to determinethe thoughts of posterity is necessarily self-defeating. From the moment of pub-lication the deconstructions of history begin, and we are left to pursue thosecontinua of interpretation, translation, and second-order discussion of interpre-tation and translation, which we so unsatisfactorily term "traditions" (John G.Gunnell has rightly warned us against supposing a "tradition" wherever we de-tect a sequence).29 Here the historian I have described moves in, with his alert-ness to the selectivities of reading and interpretation, and his propensity to de-compose the "history" of a text into the performance of many mutations in manyidioms and contexts, for which the text at times appears little more than thematrix or holding pattern. But among the recurrent phenomena of interpretationwe have already noted the habit of vesting texts and groups of texts with canon-ical authority, and we must look out not only for the deconstruction but also forthe reconstitution of authoritative texts by readers, some of whom invest themwith that coherence and unity which the historian regards with some suspicion,but which, it is not quite inconceivable, may turn out in some cases to have beenfed into them by their authors. Dominick La Capra has called for a history of howtexts considered as unities operate in history,30 and we are prepared to regardtexts as well as interpretative communities as vehicles of authority. It is becauseso many things can go on under the heading of "tradition" that we ought to bewary of using the word.

We have now separated, and subsequently recombined, the text as performing

28David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983). He calls,inter alia (p. 4), for a "history of intellectual deception," not unlike the "secret writing" madefamous by Leo Strauss. If such phenomena do not precisely have a history, they frequently occur inhistorical situations. Like Goldberg (n. 20, this chapter), Wootton is interested in the manipulativerather than the discursive possibilities of language; but you cannot manipulate all of a public all ofthe time.

29Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation, pp. 85-90, and generally; see also the ex-change of essays between Gunnell and the present author, "Political Theory, Methodology andMyth," Annals of Scholarship I, 4 (1981), pp. 3-62.

30 Dominick La Capra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," History and Theory XIX,3 (1980), pp. 245-76. Reprinted in La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Lan-guage (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).


an articulation of the author's consciousness and the text as performing an act ofcommunication in a continuum of discourse involving other actors. It is thesecontinua (sometimes misnamed "traditions") that the historian must study if hewants to understand the actions and responses, the innovations and events, thechanges and processes, that constitute the history of discourse, though this is notto say that the text as isolated artifact will not furnish him with valuable infor-mation about what was going on in the history of the languages in which it waswritten. A great deal of his attention will therefore be focused on texts undergo-ing interpretation and deconstruction as they are absorbed into the history ofdiscourse; however, this does not entail his denying that a text may have per-formed at certain moments in history with that unity that is claimed for it as artor philosophy. When the historian encounters a "great" text - as this authordoes once or twice in the essays that follow - he knows that the adjective indi-cates, first, that it has been accorded high authority or adversary status by actorsin the history he is studying; second, that it has been recognized as possessingexceptional coherence and interest by critics, theorists, philosophers, and (nowhe become dubious) historians in the community of scholars to which he belongs.He knows further that it will be his business to move between exploring itsstructure as a synchronously existing artifact to exploring its occurrence and per-formance as an incident in a diachronously proceeding continuum of discourse.The fact that these two modes of reality are seldom identical constitutes whatmight be termed das Second Treatiseproblem.

VII

The continua of discourse, which exhibit plenty of abrupt discontinuities, occupythe center of the historian's attention and appear to him to be histories of lan-guage taking place in contexts furnished by the history of experience. There is aconstant and justified demand that the two histories be connected: that the lan-guage used by actors in a society be made to yield information regarding whatthat society was experiencing, and — since we have come to accord something ap-proaching absolute priority to social experience - that language be as far as possi-ble presented as the effect of such experience. Here the historian is seen to con-cede a measure of autonomy to language, and this troubles those who cannot tellthe difference between autonomy and abstraction. Because he perceives languagesas being formed over time, in response to many external and internal pressures,he does not suppose that the language of the moment simply denotes, reflects, oris an effect of the experience of the moment. Rather, it interacts with experience;it supplies the categories, grammar, and mentality through which experience hasto be recognized and articulated. In studying it the historian learns how theinhabitants of a society were capable of cognizing experience, what experiences


they were capable of cognizing, and what responses to experience they were ca-pable of articulating and consequently performing. As a historian of discourse, itis his business to study what happened in discourse (including theory) in theprocess of experience, and in this way, which is one among others, he learns agood deal about the experience of those he studies.

The historian is of course well aware that things happen to human beingsbefore they are verbalized, though not before the humans possess means of ver-balizing them, and that language can be seen changing under pressures thatoriginate outside it. But this process takes time, and it is his business to studythe processes by which humans acquire new means of verbalization and new waysof using those they already possess. They do this by engaging in discourse withone another, conducted through the medium of languages loaded with para-digms, conventions, usages, and second-order languages for discussing usages.This is enough to ensure that the process of responding to new experience takestime and must be broken down into many processes occurring in different waysand at different speeds. The old image in which it was stated that language (orconsciousness) "reflects" society strikes the historian as paying insufficient atten-tion to time. Language is self-reflective and talks largely about itself; the responseto new experience takes the form of discovering and discussing new difficultiesin language. Instead of supposing a single mirror reflecting happenings in anexterior world at the moment of their occurrence, it would be better to supposea system of mirrors facing inward and outward at different angles, so that theyreflect occurrences in the mirrored world largely through the diverse ways inwhich they reflect one another. Discussion between mirror watchers therefore hasto do with how the mirrors reflect one another, even before it focuses on thepossibility that there is something new in the field of vision. It would be betterstill to suppose that the mirrors are arranged diachronously as well as synchron-ously, so that while some of them share the same moment in time, others arelocated in its past and future. This would allow us to recognize that the percep-tion of the new is carried out over time, and in the form of a debate about time;the historical animal deals with experience by discussing old ways of perceivingit, as a necessary preliminary to erecting new ways, which then serve as means ofperceiving both the new experience and the old modes of perception.

The historian therefore expects the relation between language and experienceto be diachronous, ambivalent, and problematic. The tension between old andnew, between langue and parole, would be enough to ensure this, were it not forthe additional fact that language games exist to be played by nonidentical play-ers, so that even actors using the same words have to stop and inquire what theymean by them. This seems to account for the appearance of second-order lan-guages (though other preconditions, such as literacy, may have to be met beforethese are socially possible), and it seems to ensure that, in the histories with


which he grows acquainted the normal relation of language to experience will beambivalent, in the sense that words denote and are known to denote differentthings at the same time, and problematic, in the sense that debate about howthey may be used to denote them is continuous. A society sophisticated enoughto have second-order languages will normally be found responding to new expe-rience by conducting debates about problems arising in its discourse. The histo-rian of discourse will therefore have to work outward from the capacities fordiscourse enjoyed by his actors, toward what he sees (and they came to see) asnew elements in their experience, and the intimations of their language may, ormay never, intersect those of the language he employs to write the history oftheir experience. To translate the perceptions of Gerrard Winstanley into thoseof Christopher Hill is a most problematic enterprise, valiantly confronted.

What this reveals is the peculiar importance of that paralanguage describedearlier, which the historian employs to explicate the implications of the languagewhose history, composed of the performances carried out in it, he is seeking towrite. We now see that he employs this paralanguage in two concurrent butdistinguishable ways. In the first place, he employs it to erect hypotheses; thatis, he affirms that the language carried certain implications that both enlargedand defined the ways in which it could be used. He articulates these implicationsin order to show what the normal possibilities of the language were, so thatshould we encounter the anomalies and innovations that accompany paradigmaticchange, we will be able to recognize them, reiterate them, and begin to see howthey came to be performed. This provides the historian with a necessary matrixfor dealing with those moments in which he sees being performed the utterancesand responses, moves and countermoves, innovations and counterinnovations, ofwhich a history ofparoles performed in and upon langues has been held to consist.The propositions into which the matrix may be resolved are hypotheses in thesense that they state what the historian expects to have happened, and we maycompare them with the preserved language of the texts in order to see if webelieve it was what did happen. In the short term, the model provided by theparalanguage is quite manageable.

The long term, however, arises when the historian wishes to write diachroni-cally and in the form of narrative: when, that is, he wishes to write a history ofdiscourse in the form of the changing pattern of some language or constellationof languages, and their uses and potentialities, over a long period of time. Hecannot stop to offer his hypotheses for testing each time an actor in his narrativemakes a move; economy apart, he may wish to offer accounts of changes in lan-guage usage so compressed in meaning, yet so far extended over time, that theycannot be ascribed to the moves performed by identifiable actors at specific mo-ments. He will be driven to write in terms that suggest an ongoing dialoguebetween the implications of the languages rendered explicit in his paralanguage,


and to that extent his history will be ideal and will be written as if it had hap-pened in the world the paralanguage delineates.

Examples will be found in the essays that follow. "Virtues, Rights, and Man-ners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought" supposes a dialogue betweenthe concepts of "virtue" and "right," and between their implied postulates, tohave gone on over some centuries in the context of a European political discourseimagined as widely distributed in space and relatively stable over time. The idealcharacter of this narrative, however, is circumscribed by the second part of itstitle, where it is clearly stated to be a model, that is, a set of generalized hy-potheses forming a matrix in which, it is suggested, the performances of specificactors in the history of discourse may be situated, in order to see how far themodel succeeds in explicating their actions. The model will also come the closerto being an account of reality as it becomes accepted that there was a mode ofdiscourse common to Western Europe, in which the key terms and their impli-cations recurred and were discussed; that is to say, it offers hypotheses concerningthe being of a continuum as well as the performances of actors. Chapter 5, "Modesof Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England," employsa model procedure of a rather different sort; it supposes that the intellectualpredicament of actors at the time prescribed can be characterized in certain termsand as arising from certain conditions, and that their performances can be inter-preted as responding to this predicament with certain strategies said to have beenavailable. The same procedure was followed in the opening chapters of the au-thor's The Machiavellian Moment,7'1 where a model situation was set up and certainempirically traceable histories, or continua of discourse, were said to emerge fromit. That was, of course, no more than that common strategy in historical expla-nation, whereby a situation is selected and the behavior of actors are said to beintelligible in it. All such strategies expose hypotheses to the kind of criticismdevised as appropriate to them.

A less easily defensible case is that of "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclu-sion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse," which forms Part III ofthis book. Here the attempt is not to characterize a single model or problemsituation - other than the division between contending "Whig" ideologies after1689 - and to affirm that what follows becomes intelligible in its light. Theattempt is rather to characterize as many as possible — or, within the parametersof the essay, as many as is convenient — of the diverse idioms in which Britishpolitical thought was conducted for the next century and a half, to trace thehistory of discourse in terms of the possibilities intimated by each idiom, and touse the resultant conversation was a commentary upon — but also by — the polit-ical culture in which it was conducted. There is circumscription: I select theseilTbe Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Prince-

ton, N.J., 1975).


and not other idioms as those in which discourse went on; but the "model" is somultiplex that it may not deserve the name, and the reader is bound to feel thatthe conversation presented is not between individual or even group actors, butbetween ideal and hypostatized modes of speech. Two points may be made here.In the first place, I will claim that the explanatory and hypothetical matrix is notlost; it is still being affirmed that the performances of specific actors will fit intothe patterns of discourse set out here, so that when they diverge we shall under-stand them better. In the second place, I will reiterate that the more diachronousthe history, the more rapidly it moves through time and the succession of perfor-mances, the more necessary we find it to abridge and intensify it in this way. Thefigures32 of metahistory become harder to avoid, and the narrative becomes moreideal precisely because it is more tentative. A history of Whig political discoursein ten volumes would have room for many more individual performances andwould test the hypotheses advanced here as exhaustively as the heart could desire.It would also be just as enjoyable to write. The relation of reconstruction todeconstruction is not that of symphony to goblin.33

VIII

I conclude here with a few remarks on the "state of the art" that is British history.In The Machiavellian Moment I emphasized the strength of the Old Whig andTory, Commonwealth and Country reaction against the financial (by extension"commercial"), oligarchic, and imperial regime that came into being after 1688and 1714, and I contended that the case for this regime and the society thataccompanied it had to be built on new modes of argument, hammered out withdifficulty in the face of opposing paradigms. Some readers have objected that thiscase was nevertheless made, though it is hard to see how this can be an objection;one suspects that their real complaint is that The Machiavellian Moment presentsthe rise of a commercial ideology as contingent, whereas they want it to havebeen primordial - a straight success story, the natural and undistorted accom-paniment to the growth of commercial society. I claim in Chapter 3 to havewritten an account more dialectical and less Whiggish than that. At all events,the essays that follow are concerned mainly with authors of the eighteenth cen-tury who expounded the values of Whig commerce and Whig aristocracy, andthe rapid modernization of both society and social understanding that the oli-garchic regime witnessed and performed. They are concerned to explore, and insome ways dispel, the paradox that oligarchy and modernity were related and notantithetical.

32 See Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978).331 mean, of course, the goblin heard walking over the universe, and emptying it of meaning, during

the playing of the symphony in E. M. Forster's Howard's End.


Being a study of historical Whiggism, the book is in some respects a Whighistory. It accepts that Whig rule is a crucial fact of modern British history; theregime consolidated (at high cost) the parliamentary form of government, and itestablished that imperial and exterior relation to Europe that Britain is still dazedby having lost. It expresses no nostalgia for the Whig order, which was describedin deeply ironic tones by most of its supporters, but it takes that order seriously:not seriously enough for liberal Marxists, but too seriously for Tory Marxists.The Tory mind of the eighteenth century was a strange blend of Jacobite andrepublican ideas, and much of that ambivalence survives in the anti-Whig his-toriography of the present day. These essays join most recent interpreters in pre-senting the oligarchic period as involved in a fermenting and ungovernable de-bate over itself; "the deep peace of the Augustans" is a vanished historians' dream,and we study the era in which English and Scottish writers for the first timeengaged in fully secular discussion of their society and its destinies, from whichpoint British intellectual history can begin to be written. Yet to present an oli-garchic regime as a polity of discussion and self-criticism is in some ways para-doxical, and the historian of discourse is always accused of maximizing the im-portance of his subject. Those who frame this accusation, however, seldom askwhat the presence of discourse means.

Historians who stress, with much justice, the extent to which the Whig re-gime was a dictatorship by its ruling groups and classes are tempted to see theruled as repressed and silent; deprived of the means of articulating a radical con-sciousness, they must accept the speech of their rulers or formulate modes ofsymbolic and semiotic opposition outside it (hence the debate as to how far crimewas a mode of social protest).34 But this oligarchy was notoriously incompetentat thought control; the nobs and the mobs sometimes shouted and sometimesshot at one another, and we do not have to regard elite and popular culture asincapable of intertraffic. It is true that the great antinomian radicals of the Inter-regnum appear to have been little known in the eighteenth century — thoughthis might well be further investigated - but enough of the Good Old Cause waskept alive by some very unlikely groups in opposition to make the extent of Torycontribution to later political radicalism a very real question. When the elite isdebating its own size, composition, and relation to the populace, the populacemay very well be listening, and the Whig oligarchy was not a ruling class, butan oligarchy within the ruling classes, which generated such debate.

The last point is relevant also to those historians of the right wing — far to theright of Edmund Burke — who mistrust the assignment of any role to the debate

34See Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, Albion'sFatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975); John Brewer and JohnStyles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and their haw in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-turies (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).


over principles. Post-Namierite historiography is in danger of settling into abelief that there is no reality except the reality of high politics, and that thepractice of high politics always succeeds in reducing discourse to insignificance:a belief, not far from a religion, currently set out in what has become the Peter-house manner — stern, nonrefutable, and arcane. But had aristocratic politics inEngland been so austere and insolent a domination that its practice was reallyimpervious to discourse, there really would have been a revolution against it.Certainly we can examine the practice of high politics with such minuteness thatwe do not see the articulation of issues playing any part in it. Although this kindof politics was being practiced in Whig Britain, there was constant and intensivedebate as to why it was going on, what its social preconditions and effects were,and whether it was necessary to be governed in this way at all; and in this debate,the aristocratic regime was as animatedly defended, and by as powerful mindsand arguments, as it was criticized. There was discourse as well as practice, anddiscourse must sooner or later furnish practice with one of its contexts, which iswhy eighteenth-century theorists constantly debated the role of opinion in gov-ernment.35

Because Whig Britain was a highly discursive polity, an oligarchy in whichthe nature of oligarchy was debated in a public space larger than the oligarchy,there can be a history of Whig discourse. There is a further sense in which thehistory of discourse is by its nature what we know as a "Whig history." It is ahistory of utterance and response by relatively autonomous agents. The history ofdiscourse is not a modernist history of consciousness organized around such polesas repression and liberation, solitude and community, false consciousness andspecies being. It looks at a world in which the speaker can frame his own speechand the utterance cannot wholly determine the response. The historian's world ispopulated by agents responsible even when they are venal or paranoid, and hedistances himself from them as his equals, distinguishing the narration of theiractions from the performance of his own. To write history in this way is ideolog-ically liberal and he may as well admit it; he is presupposing a society in whichone can utter and another utter a reply, made from a standpoint not that of thefirst performer. There have been and are societies in which this condition is metto varying degrees, and these are the societies in which discourse has a history.

35See J. A. W. Gunn, "Public Spirit to Public Opinion," in his Beyond Liberty and Property: TheProcess of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal, 1983).

PART I

Virtues, rights, and mannersA model for historians of political thought

The history of political thought is traditionally deeply affected by the study oflaw. In recent years, however, there have been some interesting undulations andoscillations. Modes of talking about politics which were strikingly remote fromthe language of the law have emerged into historical prominence; and thoughthere are signs that the historiography of political thought is now moving backinto what I shall argue is the law-centered paradigm under which it has tradi-tionally been conducted, it is an article of faith with us all that the needle doesnot return to its starting point, and some modification of the paradigm is there-fore to be expected. The title of this article is designed to circumscribe the mod-ification which may have occurred.

Consult any classical work on this subject - Carlyle or Sabine or Wolin - andwe shall find that the history of political thought, at any rate from the Stoics tothe Historicists, is organized to a very high degree around the notions of God,nature, and law. The individual is looked on as inhabiting a cosmos regulated byrational and moral principles, essential to its being, which are of the nature ofnomos, and to these philosophically perceived or divinely revealed systems man-made bodies of jurisprudence are assimilated. God Himself is looked on as a lexloquens, and even His role as the author of inscrutable grace does not much detractfrom this image. Philosophy and faith become modes of cognizing and acknowl-edging law, with the result that jurisprudence gives access to all but the mostsublime forms of intellectual experience. All this is familiar to the point of beingmost jejunely expressed, and it is a paradigm which very effectively organizes agreat deal of highly perdurable knowledge. Yet there are elements of relevanthistorical reality which it does not fit and may distort — to say nothing of the

From J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,"Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 353-68, © 1981 Sage Publications, Inc.; reprinted by permission.

37


fact that there are civilizations like the Chinese which it obliges us simply toignore.1 Thinkers appear who, like Machiavelli, bear no relation to the natural-law paradigm and must therefore be presumed to have been negating or subvert-ing it. Changes in the dominant styles of political thought are brought withinthe paradigm and treated as evidence of its destruction from without or its ex-haustion from within, little attention being paid to the possibility that perhapsthey did not belong with it in the first place. Normative presumptions maketheir appearance, and the historian is driven either to celebrate or to deplore themutation of naturalism into historicism; while at the center of the process appearsa tormented yet oddly triumphant entity by the name of liberalism, denouncedby the naturalists as insufficiently natural and by the historicists as insufficientlyhistorical, vindicated by some of its defenders on grounds robustly independentof either nature or history, yet accorded by all three — in consequence of theircentralizing concern with it — a place in history a good deal more central (I shallargue) than it has in fact occupied.

I have caused a platoon of straw men to countermarch before us, yet I do notthink I have done much violence to the organizing presuppositions within whichthe history of political thought has been conducted. Recently, however — and inpursuit of a now prevalent technique of discovering and recapitulating the voca-bularies and idioms in which political thought has been articulated in the courseof its history — there have arisen presentations of that history in which thenatural-law paradigm occupies only a part of the stage, and we learn to speak inidioms not reducible to the conjoined languages of philosophy and jurisprudence.I propose to recount parts of this newly constructed history, and then to ask somequestions about the role of law in forming the political outlook of the Westernmind.

The central occurrence in this recent historiography has been the crucial roleaccorded to what is variously termed civic humanism or classical republicanism.2

I continue to feel some preference for the former term in spite of the numerousobjections made to it; these arise from the confusions occasioned by the circum-stance that there are nine-and-sixty ways of using the word humanism and astrong desire to consolidate them, with the result that whenever one scholaremploys the term civic humanism, another will object that humanism wasn't

JSee, most recently, Kung-chuan Hsiao, A History of Chinese Political Thought. Volume I: From theBeginnings to the Sixth Century A.D. Trans. F. W. Mote (Princeton, N.J . : Princeton University Press,1979).

2Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 2nd edition (Princeton, N.J . : PrincetonUniversity Press, 1966); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J . : PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975); "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,"Journal of Modern History LIII, 1 (1981), pp. 49—72. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of ModernPolitical Thought, Volume I: The Renaissance. Volume II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, Eng:Cambridge University Press, 1978).

Virtues, rights, and manners 39

always civic. Nevertheless, the affirmation of classical republicanism has some-thing which is humanist about it; it entails the affirmation that homo is naturallya citizen and most fully himself when living in a vivere civile, and humanist tech-niques of scholarship and reschematizations of history are mobilized around thisaffirmation whenever it is made.

What concerns me in this essay, however, is to set the civic humanist mode ofdiscoursing about politics alongside the philosophical and juristic, since it is herethat recent historiography has been most interestingly problematic. Though I seeBaron's book as a crucial beginning, I am not obliged thereby to review thecontroversies to which it gave rise; however, one objection raised to his thesis,by Riesenberg3 and others, was that citizenship in the Italian republics was forthe most part defined in jurisdictional and jurisprudential terms, rather than interms arising from a humanist vocabulary of pita activa and vivere civile. An Italiancommune was a juristic entity, inhabited by persons subject to rights and obli-gations; to define these and to define the authority that protected them was todefine the citizen and his city, and the practice as opposed to the principles ofcitizenship was overwhelmingly conducted in this language.

Those concerned to expound and explore the language of classical republican-ism replied that while this was undeniably true, the two vocabularies were out-standingly discontinuous. Francesco Guicciardini, for example, was a doctor ofcivil law and had practiced as such; yet in his writings the language of republicanvirtue is regularly if self-destructively employed, while the language of jurisprud-ence hardly ever appears, least of all as a tool of normative political theory. Some-thing very similar may be said of Machiavelli, though he was not to our knowl-edge trained to the law. The argument that Guicciardini and Machiavelli wereimpractical ideologues out of touch with civic reality does not seem to carryconviction, though there is nothing that a systematically anti-intellectual histo-rian may not be expected to argue sooner or later; and though there is an attemptnow going forward to interpret Machiavelli in the context of Roman civil law, itwill have to avoid the pitfall of arguing that while he never says anything whichis either about the law or expressed in its vocabulary, his silence is evidence of anintent to destroy jurisprudence by ignoring it and talking in other terms.

We have, then, two vocabularies in which political thought has been con-ducted that are markedly discontinuous with one another because they premisedifferent values, encounter different problems, and employ different strategies ofspeech and argument. Their discontinuity becomes the more striking when wesee them used in the same context and to congruent purposes; and indeed Skinnerin the first volume of his Foundations has shown that from the late thirteenthcentury the vindication of Italian republican independence was simultaneously

3Peter N . Riesenberg, "Civism and Roman Law in Fourteenth-Century Italian Society," in Explo-rations in Economic History, VII, 1-2 (1969), pp. 237-254.


conducted in the republican and juristic modes. From Bartolus onwards, meanswere found of arguing that a republic was sibi princeps and had acquired imperiummixtum or merum over its citizens and territory; from Brunetto Latini onwards, itwas argued that a republic might demand libertas as the prerequisite of exercisingfor itself and its citizens that civic independence and virtue which formed thefinest earthly life for man. The word libertas might be found in both contexts,yet there was a profound distinction between its use in a juristic and in a human-ist context, one connected - as has been pointed out by Hexter4 - with thedistinction between liberty in the negative and in the positive sense.

Law, one may generalize, is of the empire rather than the republic. If oneargues in the tradition of Bartolus, the city acquires libertas in the sense of imper-ium; possibly it reacquires it from a princeps or imperator; it acquires a freedomto practice its own laws. If the citizen acquires libertas, he acquires a "freedom ofthe city" — the original meaning of the French bourgeoisie — freedom to practicehis own affairs protected by the rights and immunities which the law affordshim, and also by the imperium which decrees and enforces the laws. But the libertasof this bourgeois is not enough to make him a citizen in the Greek sense of onewho rules and is ruled. Guicciardini — and here perhaps (though not certainly)he was thinking as a doctor of laws — could point out that the popolo could besaid to enjoy liberta from the oppression of powerful grandi, even when they didnot enjoy it in the sense of partecipazione in the governo dello stato.5 It could beargued of course that they were most sure of it in the former sense when they alsohad it in the latter, but Guicciardini could think of other ways of constituting apublic authority powerful enough to deter private oppression; what matteredabout a repubblica was that its authority should bepubblica. Nevertheless, to lowerthe level of citizen participation in a republic could end by reconstituting it as alegal monarchy, in which every man's libertas, even his bourgeoisie, was protectedby law which an absolute sovereign administered. In the last moments of his lifeKing Charles I was heard to proclaim from the scaffold that the people's libertyunder law had nothing to do with their having a voice in the government. Thejuristic presentation of liberty was therefore negative; it distinguished betweenlibertas and imperium, freedom and authority, individuality and sovereignty, pri-vate and public. This is its greatest role in the history of political thought, andit performs this role by associating liberty with right or ius.

The republican vocabulary employed by dictatores, rhetoricians and humanistsarticulated the positive conception of liberty: it contended that homo, the animalepoliticum, was so constituted that his nature was completed only in a vita activa

4J. H. Hexter, review of The Machiavellian Moment in History and Theory, XVI (1977), pp. 306-37, reprinted as chapter 6 of On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

5Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 126, 142-3, 146 n. 59, 232, 254.


practiced in a vivere civile, and that libertas consisted in freedom from restraintsupon the practice of such a life. Consequently, the city must have libertas in thesense of imperium, and the citizen must be participant in the imperium in order torule and be ruled. Only such a political system, said Guicciardini, was an excep-tion to the general rule that government was a form of violent domination overothers.6 But it was not central to this assertion that the citizen should claimrights as against the imperium in which he was himself participant; and for thisreason Thomas Hobbes in the next century declared that the libertas emblazonedon the towers of Lucca did not prevent that city exercising absolute sovereigntyover the lives of its citizens.7

James Harrington retorted that Hobbes had mistaken the issue, and the libertasof the Lucchese citizen consisted in his membership of the republic - he oncecalled it "King People" — which exercised the sovereignty.8 The two men weretalking past one another. Hobbes argued juridically: he held that there wererights, that rights constituted sovereignty, that rights could not thereafter bepleaded against sovereignty. But the vocabulary of the law is almost wholly lack-ing from Harrington's discourse. He argued as a humanist: he held that therewas in the human animal something planted there by God, which required ful-fillment in the practice of active self-rule, and to this something — which he wasprepared to call sometimes "nature," sometimes "reason" and sometimes "gov-ernment" — he was also prepared to give the altogether crucial name "virtue." Itis central to the argument I am developing that "virtue" cannot be satisfactorilyreduced to the status of right or assimilated to the vocabulary of jurisprudence.

"Virtue" is a word with a long history and a great many meanings. It couldbe used synonymously with "nature," "essence" or "essential characteristic" - aswhen Moliere's doctoral candidate says that opium puts you to sleep because ithas a dormitive virtue; it could bear the Roman-Machiavellian meaning of acapacity to act in confrontation with fortuna; it could mean little more than afixed propensity to practice one of several ethical codes, though this propensitywas usually said to require enhancement by Socratic philosophy or Christian graceor both. As developed in the republican vocabulary, it seems to have borne severalfurther emphases. It could signify a devotion to the public good; it could signifythe practice, or the preconditions of the practice, of relations of equality betweencitizens engaged in ruling and being ruled; and lastly, since citizenship was aboveall a mode of action and of practicing the active life, it could signify that activeruling quality — practiced in republics by citizens equal with one another anddevoted to the public good — which confronted fortuna and was known to Re-

6Ibid., pp. 124-5 and nn. 21-22.7Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651), Book II, ch. 18, in any edition.8James Harrington, The Commonwealth ofOceana, 1656. J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works ofJames Harrington (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 170-1, 229.


naissance Italians as virtu, but which, as Machiavelli was to show, entailed prac-tice of a code of values not necessarily identical with the virtues of a Christian.The last-mentioned were not necessarily political at all, which is why Montes-quieu, in the preface to the Esprit des Lois, found it desirable to distinguish be-tween vertu morale, vertu chretienne, and vertu politique; the third of these was for-mally unlike the others and entailed a devotion to equality before the laws of arepublic.9 But we must now ask in what sense it is that the word ''laws" has justbeen used, which is part of the problem of the sense in which the word lois wasused by Montesquieu.

Virtue as devotion to the public good approached identification with a conceptof justice; if the citizens were to practice a common good, they must distributeits components among themselves, and must even distribute the various modesof participating in its distribution. Aristotelian, Polybian, and Ciceronian analy-sis had shown that these modes were highly various and capable of being com-bined in a diversity of complex patterns; political science in the sense of thescience of politeia took this as its subject matter. Moreover, a particular mode ofparticipation might be seen as appropriate to the specialized social individual: tobe proper to him, to be his propriety or property. Ideas of suum cuique, of distri-bution and of justice were therefore inherent in the civic republican tradition.But there were a number of senses in which the republican or political conceptionof virtue exceeded the limits of jurisprudence and therefore of justice as a juristconceived it.

The notion of ruling and being ruled entailed a notion of equality to whichthat of distribution was not altogether adequate. When one had been accordedthe share or role in the political-distributive process appropriate to one's socialpersonality and another had been accorded his, it might be said that cuique hadbeen accorded suum; but the concept of ruling and being ruled demanded thateach of them should recognize that though by any standard but one the sharesaccorded each were commensurate but unequal, there was a criterion of equality(in ruling and being ruled) whereby each remained the other's equal and theyshared in the possession of a common, public personality. While this equalitypresupposed both distribution and justice, there was a sense in which it tran-scended them and was not distributable.

If partecipazione was distributed according to socially specialized needs and nothingelse, there would (said the advocates of republican virtue) be no res publica — inAristotle's terms, there would be nopolis - in which participation, equality, andruling and being ruled were possible; to distribute public authority as a matterof private right was to them the classic definition of corruption, and under cor-ruption there would in the end be no rights at all. Equality was a moral impera-9Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, De /'Esprit des hois, 1751 (Oeuvres Completes, Paris: Galli-

mard, 1949), p. 4.


tive, not as a matter of ensuring quisques right to suum - though it did dischargethat function among others — but as the only means of ensuring res publica: ofensuring that imperium should be truly public, and not private masquerading aspublic.

The republic or politeia solved the problem of authority and liberty by makingquisque participant in the authority by which he was ruled; this entailed relationsof equality which made in fact extremely stern demands upon him, but by prem-ising that he was kata phusin formed to participate in such a citizenship it couldbe said that it was his "nature," "essence," or "virtue" to do so. But nature maybe developed, but cannot be distributed; you cannot distribute a telos, only themeans to it; virtue cannot therefore be reduced to matter of right. The laws of arepublic — the lois obeyed by Montesquieu's vertu politique — were therefore farless regulae juris or modes of conflict resolution than they were ordini or "orders";they were the formal structure within which political nature developed to itsinherent end. This is the meaning of Harrington's dictum: "Good orders makeevil men good and bad orders make good men evil."10 He said this not becausehe did not believe that men were by nature good and political, but because hedid.

It begins to look, however, as if the characteristic tendency of jurisprudencewas to lower the level of participation and deny the premise that man is by naturepolitical. One might argue that this is because the overwhelming preoccupationof the jurist is with that which can be distributed, with things and rights; if insuum cuique we read suum as an adjective, the unstated nouns are res and ius. Thereis much to be said regarding the meanings which res can assume in the juristicvocabulary and the history of those meanings; but for the moment we may de-velop the contention that since law is of the empire rather than the republic, itsattention is fixed on commercium rather than politicum. As the polis and res publicadeclined toward the level of municipality, two things happened: the universebecame pervaded by law, the locus of whose sovereignty was extra-civic, and thecitizen came to be defined not by his actions and virtues, but by his rights to andin things. We must resist the temptation to overdefine res as material objects;but one major value of jurisprudence in the history of mental culture has been itsinsistence upon, and enrichment of our understanding of, the thick layers ofsocial and material reality by which the animale politicum is surrounded and thecomplex normative life which he must lead in distributing and otherwise man-aging the things composing these many layers.

Jurisprudence reinforced by rhetoric — it was in the republic that the twotended to become enemies — was the Renaissance mind's main key to understand-ing the world of socialized things. In a recent essay, Donald Kelley has suggested

10Harrington, Oceana; Works, p . 838.


that it was the legal humanists of that era who inaugurated a modern understand-ing of history, and that the role of civic humanists has been overstated.11 It isnot exactly news, but of course it is true, that the lawyers and not the republicanswere the first social historians.12 It has always been the case against the classicalcitizen that he is at heart a tragic hero, unsafe to associate with, who insists thathe is living in the realm of freedom and not that of necessity. This is why he isconcerned with nondistributable goods like equality and virtue, and it is alsowhy he is constantly confronted withfortuna. In The Machiavellian Moment, I wasconcerned to study the material foundations - arms first and property after -which he found it necessary that virtue should have in the realm of necessity.

I am allowing my language to become Arendtian because I am interested inthe possibility that jurisprudence can be said to be predominantly social, con-cerned with the administration of things and with human relations conductedthrough the mediation of things, as opposed to a civic vocabulary of the purelypolitical, concerned with the unmediated personal relations entailed by equalityand by ruling and being ruled. I am also a non-Marxist interested in findingcircumstances under which Marxist language can be employed with validity, andI am intrigued by the connection we seem to be uncovering between law, liber-alism, and bourgeoisie. "With a great price bought I this freedom," says the Ro-man officer in Acts 21 according to the Authorized Version;13 but in the Frenchtranslation published at Geneva in 1588 he says: ilfay acquis ceste bourgeoisie avecune grande somme d'argent." He is talking about citizenship in the limited sense ofa negative liberty to enjoy one's life and goods in immunity from arbitrary actionby servants of the prince (he has just discovered that he cannot flog St. Paulbecause the latter enjoys bourgeoisie romaine too). We are discovering (1) that lib-erty defined by law invests the citizen with rights but no part in imperium\ (2)that law discriminates between the libertas which it guarantees to the citizen andthe imperium or auctoritas of the prince or magistrate who administers the law; (3)that the law defines the citizen in terms of the ius ad rem and ius in re which heacquires through his role in the possession, conveyance, and administration ofthings. Civil law, then, presents us with possessive individualism in a form longpredating early modern capitalism, and it presents us with an ancient form ofthat separation and recombination of authority and liberty which political theo-rists term liberalism. It is of no small interest to find the word bourgeoisie em-ployed to denote a negative citizenship, consisting of the possession and transfer-ence of things subject to law and sovereign authority; for this casts light upon

I I Donald R. Kelley, "Civil Science in the Renaissance; Jurisprudence Italian Style," The HistoricalJournal XXII, 4 (1979), pp. 777-794.

12J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1957); Donald R. Kelley, The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language,Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

13Hexter, On Historians, pp. 295-296.


that little-studied subject, the history of the noun and concept bourgeoisie beforeit acquired its Marxist meaning.

Social first and political after, the civil and common law define individuals aspossessors by investing them with right and property in things, and ultimately(as in Locke) in themselves. They define law itself as Janus-faced, because it is atone and the same time the right of the subject and the command of the prince.In a recent remarkable study of Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Develop-ment, Richard Tuck has emphasized the extent to which individuals were investedwith rights that they might surrender them absolutely to the sovereign.14 He isstill playing one pole of the juristic magnet against the other, and is recountingwith renewed sophistication the classical history of what we have come to termliberalism: the story of how rights became the precondition, the occasion, andthe effective cause of sovereignty, so that sovereignty appeared to be the creatureof the rights it existed to protect. It is impossible to deny that this is the principaltheme of the history of early modern political thought. But it has long been theprincipal criticism of the liberal synthesis that because it defined the individualas right-bearer and proprietor, it did not define him as possessing a personalityadequate to participation in self-rule, with the result that the attempt to groundsovereignty in personality was not thoroughly carried out. I do not intend to usehistory as a means of exploring this normative criticism; but I shall investigatesome historiographic consequences of the discovery that alongside the history ofliberalism, which is a matter of law and right, there existed throughout the earlymodern period a history of republican humanism, in which personality was con-sidered in terms of virtue.

In The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Skinner opened up a thirteenth-and fourteenth-century scene in which the jurist and humanist vindications ofrepublican liberty were conducted side by side, as far as we can see withoutoverlapping and apparently without colliding. He carried his exploration of civichumanist politics as far as 1530, when this form of thought is held to have beeneclipsed with the last Florentine republic; and after a study of the more Ciceron-ian humanism of England and the more juristic humanism of France, he trans-posed the second volume of his history into the key prescribed by the law-cen-tered paradigm. That is, it became his business to deal with the themes of relationsbetween the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the revolt against the Catholicview of the divine order, and the problem of resistance within the civil order.These questions were predominantly discussed in the vocabularies of law; andeven their philosophical matrix was one which presupposed that the truths of thedivine order were to be described as laws, and proceeded to ask whether theselaws were known to us as aspects of the divine nature or as commands of the14 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge

University Press, 1980).


divine will. Skinner emphasized the historical role of the Ockhamist and'Sor-bonnist adoption of the latter position, and showed the ways in which it wasconducive to proto-Protestant theses concerning man's relation to God, to Stoicrather than Aristotelian views of the origin of the civil order, and to theories ofthe locus of political authority in which choices between absolutist, populist, andindividualist alternatives tended to become starker.15 He was thus able to con-clude his book at a point where theories of the state, of resistance to the state,and of civil society as the ground of such resistance, had become consolidated intheir early modern forms.

This enterprise could be conducted within the requirements of the law-centered paradigm, and did not require much allusion to the vocabulary of re-publican virtue. It is true that when Machiavelli was read by jurists and scholas-tics, he tended to emerge in the company of Ockham, Marsilius, and Luther, andthere are Spanish Thomists who sought to refute him and them in a single pack-age. But to do this it was necessary to translate Machiavelli into a language hehad altogether ignored; whether he intended anything by ignoring it is a questionpast solution. The point here is that, if there is an independently evolving vocab-ulary of republican virtue, it is not necessary to trace its history in order to dealwith that of the controversies pursued in Skinner's second volume; and becausehis history of republican thought effectively concludes about 1530, and his bookas a whole comes to an end about 1590, he does not reach the point whererepublican virtue somewhat unexpectedly resurfaced in the otherwise law-centered, king-centered, and God-centered thinking of the Anglophone north.There are good reasons for this hiatus, yet I continue to lament it; for we needsome answers to the question which Hexter has characteristically phrased as "howthe devil" did this happen?16

To write the history of political thought in law-centered terms — which islargely equivalent to writing it as the history of liberalism — is, as we have seen,paradigmatically enjoined; and to contend, as is done here, that the languages ofright and virtue are not readily interchangeable is to make the latter appear anintruder and anomaly in a field defined by the former. There are signs — not,however, to be found in Skinner — of an impulse to ignore the civic humanistparadigm or to assimilate it to the juristic. Kelley's essay suggests that civichumanism has had its fair share of attention, and we should now get back to theserious business of studying jurisprudence; Tuck, too, strives to bring the repub-lican image within the rubric of civil and natural law. He seizes on the construc-tion, by the Dutch theorists Pieter de la Court and Baruch Spinoza, of a classicalrepublic out of a jurist's state of nature, and suggests that I would have had to

15 J. G. A. Pocock, "Reconstructing the Traditions: Quentin Skinner's Historians' History of PoliticalThought," The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory III, 3 (1979), pp- 95—113.

16Hexter, On Historians, p. 288.

Virtues, rights, and manners Al

modify my conclusions if I had taken account of these writers.17 It has beenshown, however, by Haitsma Mulier that they were polemicists of the Statesparty, anxious to invest the republic — i.e., the city or province — with sover-eignty, and therefore going back to the creation of jus in a state of nature as ameans of establishing its majestas rather than its virtus.18

Prior at any rate to the Scottish jurisprudence of the eighteenth century — onwhich we await forthcoming work by James Moore,19 Nicholas Phillipson andothers — and to comparable developments in France and in the thought of Rous-seau, it seems highly important to stress that the two modes remained incom-mensurate. Virtue was not reducible to right, and if a full-bodied republic shouldbe found emerging from the jurist's state of nature, it was for the less thanrepublican purpose of creating and transferring the rights which were all that astate of nature could generate. Populism, therefore, which arose from investinga populus with dominium, jus, and imperium, was linguistically and politically dis-tinct from republicanism, which arose from investing them with virtus. The for-mer was in principle likely to generate bourgeoisie, the latter the vivere civile; andmuch confusion exists because the German language uses the same word to de-note "bourgeois" and "citizen."

Viewing the historiographical field in North American perspective, I am fur-ther aware that to reassert the law-centered paradigm may have the effect ofmaintaining the liberal paradigm in a form which I have come to find misleading.There is a conventional wisdom, now taught to students, to the effect that polit-ical theory became "liberal" — whatever that means, and whether or not for moreor less Marxist reasons - about the time of Hobbes and Locke, and has in Americaremained so ever since. I find this a serious distortion of history,20 not becauseHobbes and Locke did not take part in a great remodeling of the relation of rightto sovereignty, conducted within the premises of the law-centered paradigm, butbecause to study that paradigm and nothing else leads to a radical misunderstand-ing of the roles in history played by both liberalism and jurisprudence, as well asof the relations between right and virtue with which this article has been con-cerned. I propose in conclusion to offer what I consider a better historical inter-pretation, which will permit me to deal with the third term of the triad compos-ing my title: the concept of "manners."17Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, p. 141, n. 58.18 E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century

(Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980).19James Moore, "Locke and the Scottish Jurists," distributed by the Conference for the Study of

Political Thought in "John Locke and the Political Thought of the 1680s; papers presented at asymposium sponsored by the Conference for the Study of Political Thought and the Folger Institutefor Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Studies," 1980.

20 J. G. A. Pocock, "The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism," in J. G. A. Pocockand Richard Ashcraft, John Locke (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1980); and ch. 3, thisvolume.


Hobbes's work coincides in point of time with Harrington's, which played aleading role in introducing concepts of republican virtue into England; and Locke'sTreatises are closely associated, and yet cannot be connected, with the establish-ment of the eighteenth-century Whig commercial regime and the reaction againstit in the name of virtue. We may endorse the judgment of Skinner and Dunnthat Locke's work is "the classic text of radical Calvinist politics"21 - which werecertainly constructed within the law-centered paradigm - and yet add the sug-gestion that this was a seventeenth-century enterprise, and that Locke's politicsmark the close of one age rather than the beginning of another. From 1688 to1776 (and after), the central question in Anglophone political theory was notwhether a ruler might be resisted for misconduct, but whether a regime foundedon patronage, public debt, and professionalization of the armed forces did notcorrupt both governors and governed; and corruption was a problem in virtue,not in right, which could never be solved by asserting a right of resistance.Political thought therefore moves decisively, though never irrevocably, out of thelaw-centered paradigm and into the paradigm of virtue and corruption.

The appearance of a new ruling elite (or "monied interest") of stockholders andofficeholders, whose relations with government were those of mutual dependence,was countered by a renewed (or "neo-Harringtonian") assertion of the ideal of thecitizen, virtuous in his devotion to the public good and his engagement in rela-tions of equality and ruling-and-being-ruled, but virtuous also in his indepen-dence of any relation which might render him corrupt. For this, the citizenrequired the autonomy of real property, and many rights (including the right tokeep and bear arms) were necessary in order to assure it to him; but the functionof property remained the assurance of virtue. It was hard to see how he couldbecome involved in exchange relationships, or in relationships governed by themedia of exchange (especially when these took the form of paper tokens of publiccredit) without becoming involved in dependence and corruption. The ideals ofvirtue and commerce could not therefore be reconciled to one another, so long as"virtue" was employed in the austerely civic, Roman, and Arendtian sense se-lected at the outset of this essay and highly active in the eighteenth-centurydebate; but now it was perceived that such a virtuous citizen was so much of apolitical and so little of a social animal as to be ancient and not modern, ancientto the point of being archaic.

Virtue was redefined - though there are signs of an inclination to abandon theword - with the aid of a concept of "manners." As the individual moved fromthe farmer-warrior world of ancient citizenship or Gothic libertas, he entered anincreasingly transactional universe of "commerce and the arts" — the latter term

21 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, II, p. 239; John Dunn, The Political Thoughtof John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge,Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969).


signifying both the productive and audio-visual skills - in which his relation-ships and interactions with other social beings, and with their products, becameincreasingly complex and various, modifying and developing more and more as-pects of his personality.22 Commerce, leisure, cultivation, and — it was soonperceived with momentous consequences - the division and diversification of la-bor combined to bring this about; and if he could no longer engage directly inthe activity and equality of ruling and being ruled, but had to depute his govern-ment and defense to specialized and professional representatives, he was morethan compensated for his loss of antique virtue by an indefinite and perhapsinfinite enrichment of his personality, the product of the multiplying relation-ships, with both things and persons, in which he became progressively involved.Since these new relationships were social and not political in character, the ca-pacities which they led the individual to develop were called not "virtues" but"manners," a term in which the ethical mores and the juristic consuetudines werecombined, with the former predominating. The social psychology of the agedeclared that encounters with things and persons evoked passions and refinedthem into manners; it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine thepassions and polish the manners; and the social ethos of the age of enlightenmentwas built upon the concept of close encounters of the third kind.

"Manners," declared Burke, "are of more importance than laws . . . they aidmorals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them."23 I would like to sug-gest that he had in mind ordini rather than statutes: the "laws" made by legisla-tors framing a classical order; for the concept of "manners," though it does notbelong to the operational vocabulary of jurisprudence, was in fact enormouslyadvanced by and through the study of natural and civil law, particularly jusgentium. We are now in the era of a revived and modernized natural jurisprud-ence, based on the notion that an intensive study of the variations of social be-havior throughout space and time would reveal the underlying principles of hu-man nature on which the diversities of conduct were based and from which loistook their esprit. Jurisprudence, whatever it was like as the formal study of law,was the social science of the eighteenth century, the matrix of both the study andthe ideology of manners. Once again law was pitted against virtue, things againstpersons, the empire against the republic. The tensions between virtue and com-merce, ancient and modern, helped endow eighteenth-century jurisprudence withthe complex historical schemes and the nascent historicism which make AdamSmith's Lectures on Jurisprudence a theory of the progress of society through thefour stages of production. It has even been possible for Forbes and Stein to tracethis development of jurisprudence without ascribing it to the ideological need to

22See ch. 6, this volume.23 Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796 (The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke,

London, 1826, vol. VIII, p . 172). See below, p. 209.


defend commerce against ancient virtue;24 but there is no question but that thisneed was being met and an ideological defense waged.

But the defense of commercial society, no less than the vindication of classicalvirtue, was carried out with the weapons of humanism. The eighteenth centurypresents us with a legal humanism, or humanist jurisprudence, whose roots werein Kelley's "civil science of the Renaissance," being employed against the civichumanism of the classical republicans in a way hard to parallel in the sixteenthcentury. The effect was to construct a liberalism which made the state's authorityguarantee the liberty of the individual's social behavior, but had no intentionwhatever of impoverishing that behavior by confining it to the rigorous assertionof ego-centered individual rights. On the contrary, down at least to the end ofthe 1780s, it was the world of ancient politics which could be made to seem rigidand austere, impoverished because underspecialized; and the new world of thesocial and sentimental, the commercial and cultural, was made to proliferate withalternatives to ancient virtus and libertas, largely in consequence of the jurists'fascination with the universe of res. Now, at last, a right to things became a wayto the practice of virtue, so long as virtue could be defined as the practice andrefinement of manners. A commercial humanism had been not unsuccessfullyconstructed.

About 1789, a wedge was driven through this burgeoning universe, and rathersuddenly we begin to hear denunciations of commerce as founded upon soullesslyrational calculation and the cold, mechanical philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke,and Newton. How this reversal of strategies came about is not at present wellunderstood. It may have had to do with the rise of an administrative ideology,in which Condorcet, Hartley, and Bentham tried to erect a science of legislationon a foundation of highly reductionist assumptions. But that is another chapterin the history of both jurisprudence and humanism: one lying outside the confinesof the present model.

24Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1976);Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press,1980). See also Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relationsbetween the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretations of Eighteenth-CenturySocial Thought," in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment,ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

3< =

Authority and propertyThe question of liberal origins

If one sought to characterize the drift of recent historical thinking about the crisesof seventeenth-century England, one might well say that it has been in the direc-tion of a heightened awareness of the dialectic between authority and liberty inboth the politics and the political thinking of the period. In the field of generalhistory, J. H. Plumb's very important theses of the "growth of stability" and the"growth of oligarchy" have shifted some of our attention away from the first crisisperiod of 1640-60 and toward the second crisis period of 1680-1720.l We nowsee the latter as culminating in the establishment of that oligarchical, commer-cial, and imperial Britain against which the American Revolution was directed,but whose problems America in some respects inherited;2 and the search for theorigins of this regime has obliged us to go back to the first crisis period andexamine it in terms of restoration as well as of revolution. It does not diminishthe radical or the revolutionary character of the things which happened at thebeginning and end of the 1640s to say that we cannot understand the revolution-ary impulse without also understanding its exhaustion; the study of how revolu-tions die is a little-known branch of political science.3 Perhaps the revival ofemphasis on this problem reflects the mood of our own society since 1970; whetherthis is so or not, it is a problem we do well to study. We shall not understandthe way in which the traditional constitution and the rule of the established eliteswere challenged and changed during the 1640s until we understand how andwhy they were apparently restored in 1660, and how far that restoration wasapparent and how far real. We still lack a good conceptual vocabulary for dealing

From After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, edited by Barbara C. Malament, pp. 331—54. © 1980 University of Pennsylvania Press; reprinted by permission.

1). H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967).2See chap. 4, this volume. Both chaps. 3 and 4 were first written in 1976.3Cf. James H. Meisel, Counter-revolutions: How Revolutions Die (New York, 1966).

51


with this problem; the various attempts which have been made to determine howfar the restored order was more commercially oriented than the prerevolutionaryare useful but by no means sufficient.

However, these are problems for historians; political theorists, on the otherhand, continue (rightly) to make assumptions in their own work which they baseon an understanding of what occurred in seventeenth-century political thought.What Hobbes said and what Locke said is still supposed to be important to ourunderstanding of our own political culture; what have the historians been doingto that? One must still begin by emphasizing that we cannot study the first crisisperiod solely in terms of Hobbes, or the second in terms of Locke; each periodfurnishes a complex texture of thought which both provides the context for Hobbes(or Locke) and proves to have functioned autonomously, in ways which are im-portant to us without necessarily including Hobbes (or Locke) at all. Thus, ourunderstanding of the thought of the first crisis period must continue to focus verylargely on the enormously significant topic of that great explosion of quasi-democratic antinomianism which we call Puritan radicalism for short; and this isa subject which seems to have grown more problematical as our understanding ofit has deepened. We know much more than we did twenty years ago about theworkings and inner logic of millennialism and antinomianism; one need onlymention the names of Norman Cohn, William M. Lamont, Sacvan Bercovitch,and Christopher Hill in this connection;4 and we have moved away from theproblem, much debated a generation ago, of how far religious perception was amask for perception of material and social change, to the extent that we can nowsee that, for the Puritan radical, spirit and matter were virtually interchangeableterms, so that arguing for the primacy of the one mode of thought over the otheris like arguing about the chicken and the egg. There is even a tendency to seethis hylozoistic spiritual materialism as the mainstream of radical thought, andthe scientific revolution of the Restoration period as, in ideological terms, a con-servative reaction aiming at the separation of spirit and matter in the name ofauthority and rational order.5

But there are problems here for those who wish to interpret Puritan radicalismas part of the consciousness of a revolutionary bourgeoisie: a radical antinomian-ism which is essentially part of the continuing protest of the Brethren of the FreeSpirit seems to cut too deep into social and spiritual experience to be dismissible(even though it is partly explicable) as the ideology of discontented small trades-men and craft-masters, and when one compares the earlier with the later writingsof Christopher Hill — a major student of this subject — one seems to detect

4Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, rev. ed. (New York, 1967); William M. Lamont,Marginal Prynne, 1660-1669 (London, 1963) and Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660(London, 1969); Sacvan Bercovitch, Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst, 1972). ForHill, see n. 6 below.

3 M. C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, 1976); Charles Web-ster, The Great Instauration (New York, 1976).

Authority and property: The question of liberal origins 53

something like a shift from an Old Left to a New Left: perspective. In his earlierworks, Independents and Levellers appear as pioneers of an entrepreneurial andmarket society, much as they do in the interpretations of C. B. Macpherson; butas Hill continues his investigations of chiliasm and antinomianism,6 we moveleft even of the Diggers, into the society of Seekers, Ranters, Familists, andMuggletonians, and the social setting is less that of a nascent bourgeoisie thanthat of the roving masterless men from the margins of craft and cultivation in apreindustrial society — social types who might appear at any time from the thir-teenth to the seventeenth century, and who look more like intellectual equiva-lents of Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels? or the "wandering braves" of earlyMao, than the "industrious sort of people" about whom Hill has often told us. Ido not doubt - knowing my Marxists - that a diligent attempt will be made tosort out the protobourgeois from the prebourgeois among the English radicals;and I do not doubt - knowing my seventeenth century - that this classificationwill not turn out to be very satisfactory. Writing as one no more committed thanHexter to a sequential class interpretation of history, I suspect that what we havefound is the radical consciousness of Laslett's World We Have Lost8 — that of asociety of masters and servants.

A further set of problems in the interpretation of Puritan radicalism is createdby that shift of emphasis from revolution toward restoration which furnishes thegeneral background of this survey. If we are to organize our thinking around thefact that the first crisis period culminated in the apparent re-establishment of thetraditional elites and the second in the confirmation of Whig oligarchy, we mustlook back at that marvelous explosion of radical consciousness which occurredaround 1649 and ask where it all went to. It is very tempting to reply — wewould all like to believe - that it went somehow underground in RestorationLondon, or in the English villages under the game laws, and resurfaced a centuryand a half later, in the era of Tom Paine and William Blake. There is a roman-ticism of the English Left which feels that this must have happened, and it isperfectly possible that it did; but neither the school of Christopher Hill, withtheir emphasis on the middle seventeenth century, nor the schools of GeorgeRude and E. P. Thompson,9 with their emphasis on the late eighteenth, have

6Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of theSeventeenth Century (London, 1958; New York 1964); Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution(Oxford, 1965); Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2d ed. (New York, 1967); God'sEnglishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York, 1970); Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York, 1971); The World Turned Upside Down: Radical IdeasDuring the English Revolution (New York, 1972).

7 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1965).8 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: English Society Before and After the Coming of Industry (London,

1965).9 George Rude, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730—

1848 (New York, 1964); The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); Wilkes and Liberty: ASocial Study of1763 to 1774 (Oxford, 1962); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working


yet brought to light evidence which enables us to speak very confidently aboutwhat happened to underground radicalism in the intervening period. What, afterall, do we mean by "underground"? Where does popular or populist radicalismgo in an era of repression? Is it kept going as an underground tradition by obscurearticulate groups, or does it retreat into silence, to a level of subconscious orsubarticulate potentiality, waiting to become actual again? If we are unsure whichof these to look for, it is for lack of evidence rather than lack of theory.

But in a restorationist perspective — one in which the recovery of authoritylooks as important (if not as attractive) as the assertion of liberty — we findourselves re-examining the radical tradition itself and asking what elements ofauthority may be found even there.10 The reality of antinomian libertarianism isnot to be denied; all the same, the origins of all Puritan political thought arelargely to be found in the search for the godly magistrate, and there is a sense inwhich the true meaning of antinomianism was that the individual must be pre-pared to act as his own magistrate — which imparted a peculiar tension to thedefinition of the individual as male family head, and to what the prophetic womenof the Puritan sects thought about that.11 The point is, however, that we mustbe prepared to find magisterial as well as radical elements at the heart of theantinomian tradition itself; even Gerrard Winstanley has been shown to be in-volved in the search for magistracy, and William Sedgwick — a friend but not anally of Reeve and Muggleton — can be shown to have employed the antinomianscepticism of all claims to authority as a paradoxical justification of submissionto whatever authority exists.12 And this was Sedgwick's central and permanentposition; we should not think that every antinomian retreated into quietism onlyafter his radical and revolutionary impulses had been defeated. In a world ofmagistracy, the antinomian effect could start at several points and move in severaldirections, and this is to say nothing of the broader theoretical contention — onenot limited to the seventeenth century - that it is impossible to assert even themost radical liberty without asserting some conception of authority at the sametime. Even the Putney debaters, even George Fox, even Lawrence Clarkson, wouldhave agreed unhesitatingly with this thesis.

Class (New York, 1964); Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975); "The MoralEconomy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, 50 (February 1971):76-136.

10J. H. Hexter, "A New Framework for Social History," in Reappraisals in History (Evanston, 1961),was the first to propose this restorationist perspective.

11 Keith Thomas, "Women in the Civil War Sects," in Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, ed. Trevor Aston(New York, 1965).

12The distinction between the "magisterial" and "radical" Reformations may be studied in S. H.Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia, 1962). On Winstanley, see G. E. Aylmer, ed.,"England's Spirit Unfoulded," Past and Present 40 (July 1968):3-15; J. C. Davis, "Gerrard Win-stanely and the Restoration of True Magistracy," Past and Present 70 (February 1976): 76—93. OnWilliam Sedgwick, see article in Dictionary of National Biography; works in Donald Wing ed., ShortTitle Catalogue . . . , (3:224—25); and in particular Animadversions upon a Letter and Paper, first sentto His Highness by certain gentlemen and others in Wales (London, 1656).


The shift which I am trying to describe in our understanding of the first criticalperiod can now be stated in another way. From William Haller to ChristopherHill, the emphasis has rested upon the idea of liberation, upon the rediscoveryby the saint of his own radical liberty, in salvation, in society, or in both.13 Thereis no need to abandon that emphasis; it retains validity; but we have been obligedto set beside it the perception that seventeenth-century men were still pre-modern creatures for whom authority and magistracy were part of a natural andcosmic order, and that the starting point of much of their most radical thinkingwas the unimaginable fact that, between 1642 and 1649, authority in Englandhad simply collapsed.14 In this reading, the central polemic of the English Rev-olution is not the Putney Debates, but the Engagement Controversy; and to saythis is not to be describing an ideological reaction by conservative scholars to theevents of 1968 or 1970. The line of research in question is some years older, andit presents English thinkers as responding with the greatest radicalism to theproposition that since authority had disintegrated, and God had withheld hisword as to where it was now lodged, the individual must rediscover in the depthsof his own being the means of reconstituting and obeying it. The pessimism ofAnthony Ascham was a protest against the individual's being placed in this di-lemma;15 the patriarchalism of Sir Robert Filmer now became a demonstrationthat he did not possess the natural freedom which would otherwise place him init;16 but we can tabulate a list of singularly tough-minded responses to the chal-lenge. Antinomianism itself was one: if the law had been withdrawn from men,it was that the spirit might take its place, and we can think of antinomianism asegg as well as chicken, as effect as well as cause of the English dilemma. But itis only one such response, and both Hobbes and Harrington can be depicted asanswering the question what it was in men that ultimately made authority pos-sible. To say that the individual sought to preserve himself, drew the sword todo so, but gave up his sword to Nimrod or Leviathan when he discovered thefutility of the method, was one way of defining the roots of political capacity;17

13 William Haller, Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1955, 1963).14 J. G. A. Pocock, Order and Authority in Two English Revolutions (Wellington, 1973).15 Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954); Irene Coltman,

Private Men and Public Causes (London, 1962); and above all, John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice:the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968).

16For Filmer's role in the Engagement Controversy see Wallace, Destiny His Choice, and for a full andserious study of his thought, Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975).Also James W. Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1978). Wallace hassince argued that Patriarcha itself was written about 1648.

17 Wallace, Destiny His Choice; and Quentin Skinner, "Hobbes's Leviathan," Historical Journal 1 (1964):321—33; "History and Ideology in the English Revolution," Historical Journal 8 (1965): 151—78;"The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought," Historical Journal 9 (1966): 286-317;"The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Political Obligation," in Hobbes and Rousseau: A Collection ofCritical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (New York, 1972); "Conquest andConsent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interregnum: The Quest forSettlement, ed. G. E. Aylmer (Hamden, Conn., 1972).


to say that the individual whose sword was rooted in property was free fromfortune to pursue the goods of the mind, and could now join with others to forma political body whose soul was collective intelligence, was another and a verydifferent way;18 but both were answers to the question how men left with nothingbut the sword could restore the rule of reason and authority. It is important toadd that for both Hobbes and Harrington - and forming the closest link betweentheir respective systems — a principal motive in reconstituting a natural politicswas to deny separate authority to the clergy;19 but nearly all the threads in theinconceivably complex texture of English thought in the first critical period canbe attached to and often deduced from the radical need to reconstruct authority,and though this is not the only valid mode of approach, it was quite certainly theone uppermost in the minds of most people then engaged in systematic thought.There can be no question of diminishing the radical libertarianism of the periodwhen one points out the significance of the conservative impulse; the two wereinherent in one another.

I want next to apply aspects of this analysis to the question of authority andproperty, which furnishes the first part of this paper's title. Debaters during thePuritan revolution had much to say about property, and began, as we know, todistinguish between the various historical modes in which it operated in society;and it is one of the most difficult, and valuable, questions before us to determinehow far these discussions were based upon actual, if mediated, perceptions of thechanging forms of property in contemporary reality. To begin with, it does usno harm to recall that the word is spelt in seventeenth-century printings both asproperty and as propriety; there is no consistent change in meaning between the twospellings, and had there been a tape recorder as well as a shorthand writer in thechurch at Putney, we might have learned something by hearing how Ireton andRainborough pronounced the word. The point is that property was a juridical termbefore it was an economic one; it meant that which was properly one's own, thatto which one properly had a claim, and words such asproprium andproprietas wereapplied as much to the right as to the thing, and to many things as well as themeans of sustenance or production. Clearly, the word was often used in its crudelyobvious sense; when a speaker in Richard Cromwell's Parliament says, "All gov-ernment is founded in property, else the poor must rule it,"20 there is not muchpoint in being sophisticated about him; and it is often valuable to search behind

18 J. G. A. Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), particularly book I ofThe Prerogative of Popular Government (1658).

19J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), pp. 396-400; "Time, History andEschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," in Politics, Language and Time (New York 1971);introduction to The Political Works of James Harrington; "Contexts for the Study of James Harring-ton," // Pensiero Politico XI, 1 (1978): 20 -35 .

20 Adam Baynes; see J. T. Rutt, ed., The Diary of Thomas Burton . . . , 4 vols. (London, 1828),3:147-48.


the word in its juridical uses for perceptions of what we mean when we employit in its economic-productive sense. This is what some important seventeenth-century analysts were doing. It is now naive to become excited whenever we espythe word "property" in seventeenth-century debate, and to suppose that masksare being cast aside and we now see what the debate was really about. Sometimesthey are not being cast aside, and sometimes we cannot be sure that they weremasks at all. We have to know a good deal about the strategies of contemporarydebate and the structures of contemporary language before we start peeling thesedown to assumptions about or perceptions of productive relations; and if this isgoing to be possible on some occasions, there are going to be other occasions onwhich analysis can only take us in other directions. This will have to be kept inmind even when we are dealing with seventeenth-century people who specificallytalked about changes in social relations consequent upon changes in the modes ofholding or exploiting land or movable goods.

Thus, when Ireton at Putney says that all he is arguing for "is because I wouldhave an eye to property,"21 and proceeds to affirm that the property that confersthe franchise must be an inheritable freehold, he is not so much defending aparticular form of property as seizing the high ground in debate. The Levellersare visibly uncertain whether they are trying to extend the franchise to peoplewho hold property in other legally determined ways, or querying the necessity ofthe association between property and franchise altogether, and Ireton is exploit-ing their uncertainty. Had the Levellers seen themselves as playing the formerrole, the debate at Putney could have resolved itself — as it never did — intospecific discussion and negotiation about the legally or economically defined cat-egories of proprietor to whom the franchise might be extended; and there might,when all is said and done, have been an agreed compromise about that. Iretonhad no commitment to freehold or to historic right as such; we know this fromother proposals which he was prepared to entertain. But once the Levellers gotupon the ground of manhood suffrage, or anything near enough to it to suggestthat the right to suffrage might be established on grounds to which property wasonly marginally related, they were raising the question of what the politicalpersonality and its freedom really were and on what grounds they could be estab-lished and talked about. This was the question quite consciously before the mindsof the variously sophisticated debaters at Putney; it returns us to a known sev-enteenth-century mental universe, one for which people at that time had a widerange of words and ideas; and it reopens for us the question of the authority bywhich people claim and exercise their liberty. Again and again in the Putneytranscript, we encounter moments at which the debaters get off the unfamiliarground of trying to clarify their feelings about property and pursue instead what

21 A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1949), p. 57.


really concerns them and they really know how to argue about: the problem ofestablishing the title by which they are acting as they are; the real center of debatein the first critical period—the basis in right of the de facto.

Right and principle, it can be no surprise to anyone to hear, were more real inthe minds of these debaters than social structure and change. Different assump-tions concerning the basis for action in right would have different consequencesin action undertaken, and of course they knew that; but Ireton was not simplyaligning himself with those whose property was freehold and defending theirmonopoly of the franchise — there is nothing to suggest he would have objectedto going some way outside that group — so much as anchoring in social andhistorical reality his authority for being and acting as he was, and insisting thatrights must be confined to those whose authority could be similarly anchored.And he did not see in the Levellers the spokesmen of a different group of propri-etors with alternative claims to the franchise — a description they would not haverecognized themselves — so much as people with no understanding of how toanchor authority in society at all, and no theory of property to be pitted againsthis. The fear that the poor will use an authority not rooted in property to redis-tribute property is, of course, present at Putney; but it is rather a stick to beatthe Levellers with than a fear of anything specific. It is crude and unelaboratedby those who express it, and rather ignored than answered by those who defendthemselves against it; whereas the problem of authority at large can be and isdiscussed at great length by debaters on both sides, and by all contributors to themid-century polemic, in language whose complexity defies reduction to the sin-gle issue of property.

On the assumption, then, that people think about what they have the meansof verbalizing, and that relations between the center and the margins of a lin-guistically structured world must be problematical, we must often say that prop-erty in the midseventeenth-century crisis was discussed as part of the problem ofauthority, and rather less often that this order was reversed. This does not meanthat minds of the period were unaware that the ways in which men held andexploited property, and behaved as social and political beings in consequence,were changing; on the contrary, a few contemporary theorists grounded theirexplanations of the whole crisis on precisely this perception, and it is of enormousimportance in the history of social thought that this should have happened. Butit is clearly not a sufficient explanation of its happening to say (1) that changesin property relationships were happening; (2) that a few people noticed; and (3)that everybody who did not notice nevertheless reflected the changes withoutnoticing them. The patterns of human thinking at any period are more complexthan that; and, especially when this order of change has never been noticed be-fore, there must have been reasons inherent in the patterns of thought which ledsome people to notice — reasons which may or may not have been immediately


connected with the changes that were noticed. On the assumption that ideasabout authority and ideas about property were independent variables, I wouldlike next to look into the seventeenth-century perception that property itself waschanging.

C. B. Macpherson, as we all know, put forward some years ago, in The PoliticalTheory of Possessive Individualism, the hypothesis that seventeenth-century politicalthought was importantly affected by the growth of a perception of property asmarketable.22 He constructed a model — an excellent one — of the social andpolitical consequences of a set of market assumptions, and then tested for thepresence of his model, or elements of it, in various seventeenth-century thinkers.As a result he was led to award middling high points to the Levellers and Har-rington, much higher points to Hobbes and Locke, in proportion as he was ableto find elements of the model in their thinking; and he concluded that the medianscore, so to speak, was high enough to justify the hypothesis that market as-sumptions were a constant determinant of thought in this period. Some of uswere never altogether happy with this, because it never seemed quite dialecticalenough; it all sounds rather as if something is known to have been going on, andvarious more or less sensitive instruments have recorded it with greater or lessprecision; and our notion of the behavior of consciousness in history has alwaysbeen rather less barometric than that. We also thought that Macpherson's modeltested for the presence of one thing at a time, and that if one started from theassumption that there were several kinds of possessive individual, and so of pos-sessive individualism, and that there was argument going on as between severalmodes of property and individuality, a more dialectical and less barometric pic-ture might result. In particular, there was doubt concerning his interpretation ofHarrington, because Harrington had two models of property relationships, onedenned by the presence of dependent military tenures and the other by theirabsence, and there was little need to involve the market in stating the differencebetween them. Everything relating to that debate is now in print elsewhere;23

but it is possible to push the issue a little further, in a direction which takes usto the second part of my title: the question of liberal origins.

There is now a paradigm of liberalism, though one set up more by those whowould attack than by those who would practice it. It is interesting to observehow the notion of liberalism is defined in much the same way, and attacked for

22 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). Cf.Joyce O. Appleby, Ecoonomic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978).

2 3J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957), chap. 6; Mac-pherson, Possessive Individualism, chap. 4; Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, chap. 4; The Machia-vellian Moment, chap. 11; Macpherson, chap. 5, and Pocock, chap. 3, of Feudalism, Capitalism andBeyond, ed. Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale (Canberra, 1975). See also the debate betweenMacpherson and John F. H. New, reprinted in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century,ed. Charles Webster (London, 1974), I-V.


much the same reasons, among political theorists and ideologues: on the one handby socialist humanists - followers of Macpherson or Wolin or Me Williams orLowi — and on the other hand by the classical conservative followers of Strauss orArendt or Oakeshott.24 Liberalism, as they all define it, is a view of politicsfounded on the conception of the individual as a private being, pursuing goalsand safeguarding freedoms which are his own and looking to government mainlyto preserve and protect his individual activity; and it is suggested that becausethis individual withholds from government so much of his personality — whichhe says is not the government's business but his own — government tends tobecome highly impersonal, and therefore paradoxically authoritarian in those areasfrom which it does not altogether abstain. The paradox of liberty and authority,on which I am basing my interpretations of seventeenth-century thought, wasstated in these terms by Hume, and it is highly arguable that his formulationwas prophesied by Hobbes; but through the nineteenth and twentieth centuriesthere has grown up a long tradition of attacking it. The attack is always, at leastin form, humanist, and entails the charge that the liberal concept of individualityomits too much in the interactions of personality with politics and society whichis essential to personality, and so tends to dehumanize both government and thegoverned. On the left the charge is one of failure in social humanism: the liberalindividual is said to be engrossed in acquisitive activity, and so to detach himselffrom a politics which he pays to repress those whom acquisitiveness excludes. Onthe right the charge is one of failure in civic and intellectual humanism: both theacquisitive individual and the wage-earning individual who looks to the state forprotection against him are charged with abandonment of politics - by which ismeant the heroic moralism of political and philosophical decision, practice, andcontemplation. It is perhaps because the socialist concept of individuality hasbeen heroic since its beginnings that the socialist and nonsocialist versions ofantiliberalism so often look like mirror-images of one another. One has to havebeen attacked, from right and left simultaneously, for depoliticizing thought anddehumanizing history,25 to realize just how far this brand of humanist heresy-hunt has been allowed to go.

Both versions of antiliberalism are intelligible and to that extent convincing,and there is a wide range of historical phenomena to which both are in variousways applicable. But the accusations which they level are becoming routinized —which is what one means by a heresy-hunt — and this gives one reason to believethat the range of phenomena to which they apply may have been exaggerated.24Macpherson, Possessive Individualism; Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston, I960); Wilson

Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley, 1973); Theodore Lowi, The End ofLiberalism (New York, 1969). For Oakeshott, see Of Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975).

"Richard Ashcraft, Political Theory 3 (1975): 13, 15, 2 2 - 2 3 ; Dante Germino, Virginia QuarterlyReview 51 (1975): 628-32 ; Neal Wood, Political Theory 4 (1976): 104. Compare Hexter's reviewof The Machiavellian Moment in On Historians.


The antiliberals of both camps tend to write as if the liberalism which they definehad held the field - or had expanded its control of the field without effectiveopposition — from the days of Hobbes and Locke even to the days of Marx; andit is this supposition which recent historical research has tended to modify. If oneexpresses scepticism of the historic reality of such concepts as "liberal," or forthat matter "bourgeois," the heresy-hunter will of course interpret that as mean-ing that one is a "liberal" or "bourgeois" in disguise; but among reasonablebeings, there is a useful purpose to be served by going back to some doubtsconcerning Macpherson's "possessive individualism." We shall be engaged in theexercise of trying to get a paradigm into perspective, though readers of Kuhnwill know that a covert attack on the paradigm may be entailed.

There is one English thinker of the first critical period who fits the Macphersonmodel very well indeed - so much so that his possessive individualism does notneed to be brought to light by a complicated exegesis, but is expressly renderedin his own words. He depicted men in society as creatures who drove hard bar-gains with one another, the stronger party always dictating the terms of thebargain to the weaker; he said that this was peculiarly the characteristic of asociety where property consisted in movable goods and wealth; he proposed thatwhat was needed in so individualist a society was a sovereign and indeed absolutecentral authority to regulate the bargaining process; and he pointed out that in acommercial society such a sovereign could govern with the aid of salaried profes-sional soldiers. So here we have one full-blooded possessive individualist in themiddle of the seventeenth century, and where there was one there were doubtlessmore; we must not play the trick of isolating this man by seeming to empha-size him. But his name was Matthew Wren; his father was a Laudian bishopcurrently a prisoner in the Tower; and the circumstance that his grandfather hadbeen a mercer will not really make a business spokesman out of him. Further-more, he expressed these views in the form of a critique of James Harrington'sOceana, of which he was the leading contemporary opponent;26 and he was at-tacking Harrington's doctrine that the form of property determining politics wasland, whose stability - as opposed to the mobility of goods and money - set menfree to be the rational political creatures which they were by nature. Harringtonwas, to some degree, an agrarian Utopian, and he had affirmed that two girls leftto share a cake would construct the choice rationally, by having one girl cut thecake and the other choose her piece. It was Wren who replied that the strongergirl would offer the other a small piece of cake to fetch her some water to drink

rst16 [Matthew Wren], Considerations upon Mr. Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana, restricted to the FinPart of the Preliminaries (London, 1657); Matthew Wren, Monarchy Asserted, or the State of Monarchi-call and Popular Government, in Vindication of the Considerations upon Mr. Harrington's Oceana (Oxford,1659). Harrington's replies are The Prerogative of Popular Government, book 1; The Art of Law-Giving,book 3, and Politicaster (1659); see Works (1977).


with her larger share; as succinct a statement of the possessive individualist po-sition as could be found.27

In the parable of the cake Harrington saw the image of the aristocracy propos-ing a range of choices and the democracy exercising the actual decision betweenthem, which was not only his basic conception of the political process, but - heinsisted — the essential means of infusing into the body politic a rational andpolitical soul. This was the true target of Wren's attack: he was specific in de-nying that the body politic could possess a soul, and went so far as to remarkthat before we could even discuss such an idea we should have to know what thesoul was and what the philosophy pertaining to it28 — a rather startling remarkfrom the son of a bishop and one who was much admired by other bishops.Harrington's ideas about the soul-body relationship in politics are rooted in an-cient and medieval physics and medicine — "the contemplation of form," he oncewrote, "is astonishing to man, and hath a kind of trouble or impulse accompany-ing it, that exalts his soul to God"29 — and his agrarianism links him (thoughnot directly) with the tradition of radical hylozoism, which I mentioned earlier:he is not immeasurably remote from Gerrard Winstanley, who conflated the re-lations of reason with matter, soul with body, Christ with mankind, and menwith the earth in a system of social justice. It was Wren who was the modern,and only in the next century was Harrington seen as a pioneer of experimentalscience.30 If we relate him in any degree to radical Puritanism, we commit our-selves to emphasizing the extent to which Puritan thought was rooted in antiq-uity.

The alliance with which Harrington felt himself confronted was that of math-ematicians with clerics. From the time he read Wren's Observations, he begandenouncing "mathematicians" as people who would reduce political society to acalculus of interested forces in order to deprive it of its rational soul. We mightexpect, given everything we have read or been given to understand concerningHobbes, that Harrington would rank him among enemies of this stripe, and itis of course possible to argue that he should have. But the significant fact is thatWren attacked Hobbes as well as Harrington, and that Harrington defendedHobbes against both Wren and the Laudian doctor Henry Hammond,31 the rea-son being that Harrington and Hobbes both desired to assert that Israel, fromMoses to Samuel, had been a pure theocracy, and that consequently no order ofclergy could claim a divine right to political authority.32 We might suppose thatthis adventitiously deflected Harrington's attention from the fact that Hobbes27 Wren, Considerations, p. 36. 2 8Ibid., p . 20.29 Harrington, A System of Politics, the last political work he wrote.30Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), chap. 1, contains interesting evi-

dence on this.31 H a r r i n g t o n , The Prerogative of Popular Government, b o o k 2 .32 The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 397-98.


also was among the mathematicians, were it not that Wren belonged to a largelyclerical circle who repudiated Hobbes's mathematics as energetically as they re-pudiated everything else about him. Wren was a layman, but he was a protegeof John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College and founding father of the RoyalSociety, who serenely made the transition from being Cromwell's brother-in-lawunder the Protectorate to being bishop of Chester under the Restoration. It wasWilkins who had urged him to undertake the criticism of Harrington;33 and theOxford professors of mathematics, whom Hobbes had attacked in 1656, were allof the same kidney as Wilkins.34 Harrington could see as little difference betweenprotectoralists and royalists as he could between Presbyterians and Anglicans,and he was justified by his own perspective. Wren's commercially based theoryof politics is the foundation of an antihylozoism which enables him both to un-dermine Harrington's republicanism and to restore the position of the clergyagainst the attacks of Harrington and Hobbes. It would be delightful to concludeby finding an ideological aspect to the differences between Hobbes's mathematicsand those of the Oxford circle, but I do not know if this can be done.

At all events, here is the ideological context for the most specific piece ofpossessive individualism known so far. It was the bishops who promoted the"bourgeois ideology," the Latitudinarians who were the liberals. We have fallenin with that tradition which sees Restoration Arminianism, rather than Puritan-ism, as the ideological reinforcement of the scientific revolution and particularlywith the important work of Margaret C. Jacob, who has argued that Newtonianscience was promoted by a Latitudinarian clergy, many of whom had made somesort of transition from the Laudian ranks, as an antidote to a lingering and poten-tially radical hylozoism, which had survived from the Puritan revolution andforms a kind of underground or dark underbelly to Restoration philosophy.35

One can see how both a physics based on laws of motion, and a politics based oninterest and acquisition, would serve their purpose, and there is much to be donewith the notion of a hylozoistic and in some respects occultist underground,running through the Restoration and the clandestine aspects of the early En-lightenment, to surface again in the late eighteenth century. The immediatepoint I should like to make, however, is that the thesis that individualism pointstoward authoritarianism seems to be holding up well, but that we are obliged toleave a good deal of room for the possibility that the authoritarians promotedindividualism for their own ends. I have been suggesting in this paper the use-fulness of remembering that the notion of property might subserve that of au-33 Wren, Considerations, unpaginated introduction; Barbara Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614-1672: An

Intellectual Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 116-17.34 H o b b e s , Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of the Mathematics ( 1 6 5 6 ) , in The English Works of Thomas

Hobbes, ed . W i l l i a m M o l e s w o r t h , 11 vols . (London , 1845) , vol . 7 .35 W e b s t e r , Intellectual Revolution, p p . xiv—xxv, is a useful an tho logy of w r i t i n g s on th i s ques t i on ;

J a c o b ; The Newtonians and the English Revolution.


thority, rather than the other way about; and we seem to have been looking atcases where a possessive-individualist view of society was promoted by membersof a recovering ruling class, rather than by members of any new class which wasreplacing it. That the ruling classes of England became significantly more com-mercial in their membership and behavior during the first critical period seemsmuch harder to maintain than that, during the same period, some of them dis-covered the utility from their point of view of a commercially based ideology.The clergy and other administrative elites may have invented a bourgeois ideol-ogy without belonging to, or recognizing the predominance of, any bourgeoisiethat practised the ethic they described. This does not tell us, of course, how itbecame possible to invent such an ideology; but there has to be a non-Marxistreading of English history in which the ruling elites use the commercial classeswithout surrendering to them. This suggests an answer to the only problem thatarises from Jacob's excellent study: if - as she insists - Hobbes was the apologistof market society, and the Latitudinarians and Newtonians were the apologists ofmarket society, why was Hobbes the principal enemy whom the latter desired tooverthrow?

But the Restoration of 1660 was the restoration of the established landholdersas well as of the clerical and bureaucratic elites;36 and therefore a view of politicalpower based on the acquisition of movable goods is only one of the ideologies ofproperty and authority possible in the era of history that then began, though itwould be fair to say that the individual as magistrate was very rapidly replacedby the individual as proprietor. The second critical period, which we date fromabout 1675 to 1720, marks the beginnings of the verita effettuale of that tensionbetween real and movable property which Harrington and Wren had prefigured,and our use and understanding of the liberal paradigm has to be re-examined inthis light. Our histories of political thought in this second period have tradition-ally been dominated by the figure of Locke, and it has been established practiceto interpret all contemporary and subsequent thought about politics with refer-ence to his theories of consent, trust, and dissolution, and all thought aboutproperty with reference to his theories of labor and acquisition. But for abouttwenty years the received image of Locke has been subjected to some powerfulsolvents, as a result of which his role has been not so much diminished as ren-dered problematical. Peter Laslett demonstrated that the Two Treatises were writ-ten well before the Revolution of 1688, as a by-product of the Filmerian contro-versy of 1679—81; work carried out by myself on the ideological climate of theyears beginning about 1675 seemed to uncover whole universes of discourse —the controversy over parliamentary history, the neo-Harringtonian revival — whichwere of great importance to Locke's closest associates, but which Locke himself

36For the last mentioned, see G. E. Aylmer, The State's Servants (London, 1973).


ignored while doing nothing to terminate; Philip Abrams and John Dunn broughtto light readings of the theory of consent, and of Locke's politics in general, agood deal more angled toward the problem of authority than we used to think,and of such a character that it was doubtful how usefully the concept of liberalismcould be employed in speaking of him.37 There is now going forward a revisionof the ideology of 1688, both in the months of revolution itself and in the ensu-ing twenty-five years, which indicates that Locke's position — his insistence thata dissolution of government was not a dissolution of society — while seeminglymoderate, was in fact too radical to represent the emerging political reality. SomeWhigs in the Convention not only insisted that there had been a dissolution ofgovernment, but were prepared to fill the vacuum with structures that recall the1650s as much as anything in the Two Treatises?* but those Tories who hadreluctantly accepted the revolution — and whose ideas dominate the thinking ofthe next quarter-century39 - not only successfully maintained (and obliged theWhigs to agree) that there had not been a dissolution of government, but forceda general revival, reconsideration, and even reprinting40 of the debate of 1649—51 concerning obedience to a de facto regime, which was to be of great importanceto Edmund Burke a full hundred years later.41 This was why the Whigs had tosettle for a constitutionalist rather than a contractualist legitimation of the Rev-olution.

The effect of all this has been to create problems in the historical if not thephilosophical understanding of Locke's political thought; our perception of thecontext in which he operated has been so greatly enlarged and complicated thatwe now have great difficulty in seeing how he should be connected with it, andthis is rendered no easier by Locke's own secrecy regarding his authorship anddenials of concern in aspects of debate which almost certainly did concern him.42

37 Pe te r Laslet t , ed.,John Locke: Two Treatises of Government ( C a m b r i d g e , I 9 6 0 , 1963) ; Pocock, The

Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, chaps. 8—9; Politics, Language and Time, chaps. 3—4; TheMachiavellian Moment, pp. 423-24 , 435-36; Philip Abrams, ed.,John Locke: Two Tracts on Govern-ment (Cambridge, 1967); John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of theArgument of the Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1969). On Locke and liberalism, cf. M.Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London, 1969), for whom the elements of authoritarianismin Locke are inherent in the liberal tradition. Dunn argues that they are anterior to it.

3 8 J u l i a n H . F rank l in , John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty ( C a m b r i d g e , 1978); M a r k G o l d i e , " T h e

Origins of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought, I, 2 (1980), pp. 195-236.39See J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of 'Party, 1689-1120 (Cambridge, 1977); Martyn

P. Thompson, "The Reception of Locke's Two Treatises ofGovernment," Political Studies 24 (1976).40See Skinner, "History and Ideology in the English Revolution."41 See Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

(1794). H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lon-don, 1978).

4 2 T h u s , it is not possible to discover Locke's connection wi th the neo-Harr ingtonian wri t ings spon-

sored by Shaftesbury in 1 6 7 5 - 7 7 , though he mus t have been very close by; K. H . D . Haley, The

First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), p p . 391—93. For other instances see Laslett, passim, and

Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London, 1957).


It is not possible any longer to regard him as, in isolation, the philosopher of theRevolution, and it will be some time before this reconstruction of the contextrestores us to having the means of assessing his real importance in the history ofideas and ideology. That importance was probably great, but we have at presentno very satisfactory way of evaluating it.

It is clear — to begin moving from an emphasis upon government toward anemphasis upon property — that Locke played no predominant role in the forma-tion of what Caroline Robbins has called "the Whig canon" in the tradition of"the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen."43 That group of middle and lateseventeenth-century writers, and the Tories as well as Whigs of the second criti-cal period who singled them out for canonization, are denned by their relation tothe classical republican tradition, with which Locke had little if anything to do.They took a "country" as opposed to a "court" view of the ideal of the balancedconstitution, which, following Corinne C. Weston,44 we now date back to CharlesI's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament, published in 1642; and theysaw this balance as threatened by the renewal of the crown's command of parlia-mentary patronage, which had first surfaced about 1675. For a century and ahalf, from the Bill of Exclusion through the American Revolution to the FirstReform Act, the secret of English government, and the matter of English polit-ical debate, was to be the role of patronage, or, as its enemies termed it, "corrup-tion"; and what still requires emphasis is that this was to be discussed in termsof the relation of property to personality. What troubled the "country party" or"commonwealth" thinkers — among whom, we now know, nearly all articulateAmericans of the Revolutionary generation are to be included45 - was less theencroachment of the executive's constitutional powers on those of the legislature,than the growth of the executive's capacity to bring the members of the legisla-ture, and of society in general, into personal, political, and economic dependenceupon it. This destroyed the balance of the constitution by destroying that per-sonal independence which could only belong to men whose property was theirown and did not consist in expectations from the men in government; and themoral quality which only propertied independence could confer, and which be-came almost indistinguishable from property itself, was known as "virtue." Whatwe used to think of as the Age of Reason may just as well be called the Age ofVirtue; or rather, what used to appear an age of Augustan serenity now appearsan age of bitter and confused debate over the relations between reason, virtue,

43Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Developmentand Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with theThirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

44 Corinne C. Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).45There is now an extensive literature on this subject; see Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican

Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,"William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972): 49-80.


and passion.46 I am looking ahead from a "second critical period" ending about1720 to an "eighteenth century" which ended about a hundred years later becauseit is important to emphasize that the polemic against Alexander Hamilton whichJefferson and Madison conducted in the 1790s was to a remarkable degree areplay of an English polemic which had begun in the 1670s47 — but which couldnot have been conducted in the sixteen-fifties because the relation of patronageto property was not then in question.

What revisions may all this suggest in our thinking about possessive individ-ualism, about the paradigm of liberalism and that antiliberal interpretation ofmodern political history whose different versions we looked at earlier? In the firstplace, it must be observed that our emphasis has moved forward in time. We nolonger see the essential shifts in either the structure or the ideology of Englishproperty as taking place in the middle seventeenth century, still less in the so-called Tawney's century preceding it,48 but in the.quarter-century following theRevolution of 1688. It was then that what had been a highly theoretical debatebetween Harrington and Wren exploded and became a public issue, and a com-monplace of debate came to be that major changes had occurred in the characterof property itself, and consequently in the structure, the morality, and even thepsychology of politics. All these things began, with spectacular abruptness, tobe discussed in the middle 1690s; and compared with this great breakthrough inthe secular consciousness of political society, the attempt to discover market con-notations in Hobbes, or even Locke, sometimes looks rather like shadow play.There are some reasons for thinking that the great debate over property and virtuewas conducted on premises not apparent to Hobbes or even Wren; as for Locke,the point to be made is that the debate seems to have been conducted with verylittle reference to anything he had said. An analysis of his writings will certainlydefine for him a position in relation to it, and we will some day find out whenthis analysis and definition were first conducted; but if one desires to study thefirst great ideologist of the Whig system of propertied control, one may studynot Locke, but Defoe.49 The articulation of political thought in the second crit-ical period was moving from the control of philosophers into that of men of lettersand semiprofessional journalists. Again, let me say that Locke will return to us,but he is at present moving along a remote orbit.

In the second place, the great debate over property was conducted in terms towhich the Macpherson market model does not seem altogether crucial. Harring-

4 6See chaps. 1 3 - 1 5 of The Machiavellian Moment. Such a synthesis, still necessary in histories ofpolit ical t h o u g h t , would be redundant to a historian of l i terature or phi losophy.

47 See Lance Bann ing , The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, 1977).48 For a s tudy of the his tor iography of the period from 1540—1640, see Lawrence Stone, Social Change

and Revolution in England, 1540-1640 (London, 1965), p p . x i - x x v i .49 The Machiavellian Moment, chap. 13. T h e history of political t h o u g h t — a s dis t inct from tha t of

social awareness in l i te ra ture—seems to be wi thou t a full-length s tudy of h im .


ton — who remained a significant figure in the next century — had operated witha simple distinction between feudal and freehold tenure; Wren and others hadpointed to the possible importance of commercial wealth; but there had reallybeen, and was to be, very little attention paid to the thought that freehold landwas liable to become a marketable commodity. What Harrington and Wren bothdesired to say, from opposite value positions, was that land, or real property,tended to make men independent citizens, who actualized their natural politicalcapacity, whereas mobile property tended to make them artificial beings, whoseappetites and powers could and must be regulated by a sovereign. If we are tomove Hobbes into the latter camp — as is certainly possible — it was not apparentto the debaters in the 1650s that he belonged there, or that he was an advocateof a mobile-property society in the way that Wren was. But Harrington andWren lived on the eve of a great reassertion of control by the landed elites insociety, fully as important as the expansion of commerce and finance which wasto accompany it; and the debate they had begun was to be continued in thecontext of a dialogue between real and mobile property within the post-1660 andpost-1688 political order.

If we look at the history of events in the growth of political consciousness, wefind that there was a confrontation between real property and government patron-age before there was a confrontation between real and mobile property, and thatwhen the latter occurred it was because mobile property presented itself in theguise not of a marketable commodity, so much as of a new and enlarged mode ofdependence upon government patronage. The ideal of property as the basis ofindependence and virtue was first stated as against the revival of patronage by thecourt politicians in the 1670s. No conflict with mobile property was entailed orimplied, and the critique of patronage was as acceptable in London as in theshires. What escalated the great debate was not the political revolution of 1688,but its largely unanticipated consequence, the so-called financial revolution ofthe 1690s;50 and this confronted the ideology of real property with a threat fromthe operations not of a trading market, but of a system of public credit. At veryhigh speed there was created a new class of investors great and small — Locke wasone of them - who had lent government capital that vastly stabilized and en-larged it, and henceforth lived off their expectations of a return (sometimes amarketable one) on their investments. The landed classes, and still more theirideologues to the right and left, saw in this process a revolutionary expansion lessof a trading and manufacturing market, than of a system of parliamentary pa-tronage. The mode of property which they now began to attack, and to denounceas a new force in history, transforming and corrupting society, was not propertyin exchangeable commodities — they called this "trade" and greeted it as a means50 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit

(London, 1967).


to independence and virtue — but property in government office, governmentstock, and government expectations to which the National Debt had mortgagedfuturity: there is a real sense in which the sense of a secular future is the child ofcapitalist investment.51 They called this "public credit," a mode of propertywhich rendered government dependent on its creditors and creditors dependenton government, in a relation incompatible with classical or agrarian virtue. Itwas a property not in the means of production, but in the relationships betweengovernment and the otherwise property-owning individual; these relationshipscould themselves be owned, and could be means of owning people. The percep-tion of credit in many ways preceded and controlled the perception of the market;it can be traced in the literature how the Tory and Old Whig ideologues came toperceive "commerce" as a new and ambivalent force in history mainly in propor-tion as they came to perceive it as the precondition of "credit." It was the latterconcept that was and remained crucial.

Once we are prepared to admit that the first widespread ideological perceptionof a capitalist form of political relations came into being, rapidly and abruptly,in the last years of the seventeenth century and the two decades following, anumber of consequences follow. I have tried to show elsewhere that since capital-ism in this form was perceived in terms of speculation rather than calculation, itsepistemological foundation appeared as fantasy rather than rationality — withsome interesting sexist implications — and that goods had to be reified, and thelaws of the market discovered or invented, in order to restore reality and ratio-nality to an otherwise purely speculative universe.52 The interests succeeded thepassions - as is beginning to emerge from the researches of scholars53 - as ameans of disciplining and rendering them manageable and intelligible. But itwas the individual as classical political being whose capacities for self-knowledgeand self-command — expressed in the ideal of virtue — were rendered uncertainand dissolved into fantasy, other-directedness, and anomie by the corruptions ofthe new commercial politics. The social thought of the eighteenth century hasbegun to look like a single gigantic querelle between the individual as Romanpatriot, self-defined in his sphere of civic action, and the individual in the societyof private investors and professional rulers, progressive in the march of history,yet hesitant between action, philosophy, and passion. It seems perfectly possiblethat both classical economic man and classical socialist man were attempts torescue the individual from this Faustian dissociation of sensibility.

This suggests that we might keep intact that important element of the antili-beral paradigm which presents classical political man as somehow destroyed bythe advent of eighteenth-century capitalism; and we should indeed keep this

31 See chap. 5, this volume. 52See chap. 6, this volume.53 Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Prince-

ton, 1976).


generalization in view and try to state it correctly. But the juxtaposition of polityand economy — to borrow the language of Joseph Cropsey54 — ought not to bestated as a simple antithesis; I want to argue that it was an unending and unfin-ished debate. The main historical weakness in the antiliberal position is that allits practitioners, right and left, are so anxious to find, that they antedate andexaggerate, some moment at which economy became emancipated from polityand market man, productive man, or distributive man declared that he no longerneeded the patdeia of politics to make him a self-satisfactory being. I cannot findsuch a moment (not even a Mandevillean moment)55 in the eighteenth century,because the dialogue between polity and economy remained a dialogue, and be-cause both political man and commercial man were equipped with theories ofproperty as the foundation of political personality which could not be separatedfrom each other. Once political virtue was declared to have an agrarian base, itwas located in the past; and the movement of history toward credit, commerce,and the market was defined as a movement toward culture but away from virtue.Subject to these definitions, the formulation of a "bourgeois ideology," in thenaive sense of a declaration that market behavior was all that was needed to makea human being a human being, was an extraordinarily difficult task, and weshould doubt if it was ever naively accomplished. If we find someone who seemsto us to have formulated such an ideology, we have to remember that he emergedfrom a context in which it was openly problematic whether such a thing couldbe done, and we should not be surprised to find in his ideology unresolved con-tradictions of which he was well aware. It might even be that the ideology ofmarket society was perfected as an antithesis by those who desired to destroy it.

I return in conclusion to the suggestion that Macpherson's market model ex-plained only one group of phenomena and did not account for their opposites. Ithink that both socialist and classical antiliberals have been so intent on thelocation of economic man that they have taken account only of those phenomenawhich indicate his presence, and have suggested that one set of chromosomesalways drove out another, with the result that somewhere in the eighteenth cen-tury or the nineteenth must be found the moment when political man died andeconomic man reigned in his stead. It is now in doubt if such a moment everoccurred at all. It seems that the classical ideal quite simply did not die; that itwas reborn with the great recovery of aristocracy which marks the later seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries, with the result that property was alwaysdiscussed in the political context of authority and liberty.56 Property was thefoundation of personality; but the acid test of personality was whether it required

54 Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (Chicago, 1957)."Thomas Home, The Social and Political Thought of Bernard Mandeville (New York, 1977).56For a study of Adam Smith contrary to the liberal paradigm, see Donald Winch, Adam Smith's

Politics: An Essay in Historiographical Revision (Cambridge, 1978).


most to be affirmed in liberty or governed by authority. When modes of propertyarose that did not favor political virtue, they suggested private freedom and po-litical sovereignty, and to that extent the antiliberal paradigm holds good; but —the strength of the classical ideal remaining — the apparition of an individualrendered nonpolitical and nonvirtuous by his property occasioned terrible concep-tual problems. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the historically problem-atic individual, who could neither return to ancient virtue nor find means ofcompletely replacing it, had made his appearance; and he was present, uneasilybut effectively occupying the stage of history, before classical economic man,American democratic man - a close relative - or German dialectical and in duecourse socialist man, had arisen to suggest ways of escaping or resolving hisproblems. In this scenario, we can, of course, find highly systematic liberal phi-losophies occurring from time to time; but they always appeared in response toproblems which they did not persuade everybody they had succeeded in solving,and they can be made to look as much like incidents as like turning points in thehistory of social consciousness. I am not calling in question the historical realityof "liberalism" or "possessive individualism," so much as those "liberal," or ratherantiliberal, interpretations of history, in which everything leads up to and awayfrom a monolithic domination of "liberal" ideas somewhere in the nineteenthcentury. I see the formulation of these ideas as always problematic and precarious,and I am even prepared to entertain the notion that "liberal" or "bourgeois"ideology was perfected less by its proponents than by its opponents, who did sowith the intention of destroying it. What went on in the eighteenth century wasnot a unidirectional transformation of thought in favor of the acceptance of "lib-eral" or "market" man, but a bitter, conscious, and ambivalent dialogue. Incontemporary scholarship, it is the Marxists who are the Whigs,57 their criticswho command a dialectic.57 Professor Macpherson was heard, at this point in the original reading of this essay, to remark that

he had been called many things in his time, but never that before. I remain impenitent.

1776The revolution against Parliament

We come at last to consider a truly British revolution;1 one which even involvesa revolt against being British. In 1641 and 1688 the kingdom of Great Britaindid not exist, and the events in Scotland which preceded one English Revolutionin 1637 and followed another in 1689 took place in what was still, though it wasceasing to be, an autonomous political culture; while the unsuccessful last standsof the Old Irish and Old English aristocracies in 1641 and 1689 occurred in anIreland whose political development had not yet reached the point where so so-phisticated a term as "revolution" in its modern sense would be appropriate. JohnPym and John Adams may have been revolutionaries; Sir Phelim O'Neill andSwearing Dick Talbot were not. But in the high eighteenth century provincialvariants of Whig political culture had established themselves in Lowland Scot-land, among the Anglo-Irish, in New England, in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia;there was a kingdom of Great Britain and, briefly, there was an Atlantic Britishpolitical world - rather vaguely termed an empire - which reached from theNorth Sea to the headwaters of the Ohio. But within this greater Britain thereoccurred a revolution which must be thought of as the outcome of its commondevelopment, but which resulted in the detachment of its English-speaking sec-tor on the mainland of North America, to become a distinct nation and a highlydistinctive political culture. The first revolution to occur within a "British" po-litical system resulted in its partial disruption and the pursuit by one of its

From Three British Revblutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, edited by J. G. A. Pocock for the Folger Shake-speare Library, pp. 265-88. ® 1980 Princeton University Press; reprinted by permission of PrincetonUniversity Press.

xThis essay was read to a symposium on "Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1116," held atthe Folger Shakespeare Library in 1976.

73


components of an independent history; and the same is true of the second, oth-erwise known as the Irish Revolution of 1912-22.

Since, when we talk of "Britain," we mean an English domination of associatedinsular and Atlantic cultures, there is a profoundly important sense in which theAmerican Revolution can only be understood by placing it in a series of crisesoccasioned by the growth and change of English political institutions. To Amer-icans, its significance must be national; an American personality had taken shapein an American environment, and the Revolution is the crisis of its independence.This, obviously, is beyond refutation. But in the "British" context, we have tosee it, first as a crisis in the history of the Anglo-Scottish consortium set up in1707, second as a crisis in the history of that central and most English of itsgoverning institutions, the King-in-Parliament. In 1641—60 and in 1688—89,crises occurred in the relations between the English Crown and English proper-tied society, from which the King-in-Parliament emerged reinforced, if pro-foundly transformed; the ability of England to create and consolidate "Britain"and to pursue an Atlantic empire was one of the byproducts of 1688. But in1776, or rather between 1764 and 1801, the capacity of Parliament for provincialgovernment — and in lesser degree, the way in which it currently governed En-glish society — were severely challenged. In the American colonies there occurredthe revolution against Parliament which I have chosen for my title; the authorityof Parliament was successfully overthrown, its appropriateness as a form of gov-ernment was denied to the satisfaction of Americans, and there emerged a newpolitical society, a transformed version of a quasi-republican alternative to parlia-mentary monarchy which had been latent in the English tradition since the rev-olutions of the seventeenth century. In Britain proper, however, the authority ofParliament was shown to be so deeply rooted in the conditions of society that itsoverthrow was unthinkable anywhere to the right of Thomas Paine; the revolt ofAmerica did very little to shake it, and after fifty harsh years of industrializationand war it proved capable of enlarging and later democratizing its own electoralbase. To complete the post-American picture of the now sundered North Atlan-tic, we must add the Anglo-Irish relationship as a case intermediate betweenindependence and parliamentary union; the former was only marginally at-tempted during 1780—1801, but the latter did not take root.

In a context of British history, therefore, the origins of the American Revolu-tion present two characteristics: the inability of Whig parliamentary governmentto extend itself to colonies of settlement, and the existence within the parliamen-tary tradition of a republican alternative which could be used to deny Parliamentits legitimacy and to suggest that other modes of government were possible. Itis not hard to see why the colonial elites could not develop into parliamentarycounty gentries, but I must leave to others the description of what manner ofpolitical beings they did become; it should be emphasized, however, that for a

1776: The revolution against Parliament 75

long time they imagined themselves as parliamentary gentries, and only in rev-olutionary trauma admitted that they must be something else. The importanceof the alternative ideology — the republican, commonwealth, or country tradition- is that it provided Americans with a radical but rather shallow explanation ofwhy they could no longer be parliamentary Englishmen, and a rather profoundunderstanding of what else they might become. But in tracing history in termsof contemporary self-understanding — which is what the history of ideology reallyamounts to - one is not playing a barren game of pitting one cause againstanother cause, or one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contem-porary perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of thatperception. It can also be shown, I believe, that ideology offers a commentary onthe growth and change of the parliamentary institution, which assists us in un-derstanding the limitations of parliamentary reality: the reasons why governingAmerica, but not governing Ireland, confronted Parliament with challenges itpreferred not to meet.

II

When James Harrington - who insisted that domestic and provincial govern-ment were different in kind — surveyed in the late 1650s the imminent failure ofthe first English revolution, he felt quite sure of two things. The first was thatthe government of Charles I had collapsed because there was no longer a feudalaristocracy to support it; the second was that the government of Charles II - ifrestored, as seemed increasingly likely - would not have the support of any viablehereditary or entrenched aristocracy, because such could exist only in a feudalform. There was a good deal to be said for the first of these perceptions, but agood deal less for the second; Harrington had failed altogether to predict thatspectacular reconstitution of a governing aristocracy which followed the declineof the Tudor magnate class whose crisis has been charted by Professor Stone. In1642 the House of Lords could do little to arrest the drift toward civil war; in1688 those peers who happened to be in London could come together of them-selves to exert a measurable influence on the situation precipitated by the flightof James II.2 The Restoration of 1660 - which may be said to have begun withthe solid determination in Richard Cromwell's Parliament to bring back theHouse of Lords3 — had marked the recovery of parliamentary and political aris-tocracy. The creation of peers by Charles II had furthered, though it had notcaused, the growth of a class of habitual politicians who frequented the Court,

2David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford, 1955), pp. 217, 219-20. Seealso David H. Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North: Aspects of the Revolution of 1688 (Hamden,Conn, 1976).

3J. T. Rutt, The Diary of Thomas Burton . . . (London, 1828), in and iv; Harrington, Works,Pocock, ed., Introduction, pp. 102—4.


the Town, and to some extent the City, knew each other well if they hated eachother heartily, and maintained that inner world of high politics whose existencecontinues to fascinate English neo-conservative historians to the point where theyare reluctant to acknowledge the political reality of anything else. It is the pres-ence and efficacy of this coterie which marks the real difference between 1641and 1688; but though the word "Court" was in use in both eras, the decline ofthe old palace-centered political world of courtiers and councillors was irremedi-able. The new Court was attendant upon Parliament as much as upon the King;and it was made up of men who understood the simpler arts of parliamentarymanagement, of acting as a "screen or bank" between King and Commons, atany rate better than their predecessors had done, and who found in the House ofLords a very tolerable political club.

In the reign of Charles II it was already understood that there existed a class ofparliamentary managers and magnates — moving steadily into the hereditary peeragebut never identical with it - whose strength consisted in their closeness to exec-utive authority and in (what was not quite the same thing) their command ofpolitical patronage, influence, and what its enemies termed corruption. One neednot deny the importance of economic change - of the strict settlement, the mort-gage, and improved techniques of estate management - in permitting a class ofgreat landowners to survive and engross its estates,4 if one emphasizes that thegoverning aristocracy of late Stuart and Hanoverian England was a parliamentaryaristocracy; and though we may debate the control and efficacy of patronage as atechnique of government, we need not doubt its reality as an issue and a value.Whig England, it may be said, held as a self-evident truth that every politicalman was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of influence. One might evenquestion, in tracing the growth of this governing order, the importance of 1688itself, considered as an isolated episode. Too many reluctant Tories, cursing theirKing and themselves with equal fervor, went along with that amazing and un-desired upheaval to give it the immediate character of a shift in social power. Thestress might fall rather upon two of the Revolution's admitted consequences: the"financial revolution" of the mid-l690s and, twenty years later, the SeptennialAct, which formed the keystone of what J. H. Plumb has termed "the growth ofoligarchy."5 In the first of these were created the great institutions of publiccredit — the Bank of England, the National Debt, and, less auspiciously, theSouth Sea Company — which brought the postrevolutionary regime the political

4 The classic views are those of Sir John Habakkuk; see most recently, "The Rise and Fall of EnglishLanded Families," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29 (1979), pp. 187-208, and30 (1980), pp. 199-221. For a criticism, see Eileen Spring, "The Family, Strict Settlement, andHistorians," Canadian Journal of History XVII, 4 (1983), pp. 379-398.

3 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit(London, 1967); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London,1967).


stability, founded on a large class of investors, and the financial resources neces-sary to wage war in Europe, to absorb a Scotland ardently desirous of commercialopportunity, and to pursue empire in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and India.In the second — after two decades of Country and Tory rebellion against war,high taxes, and government by patronage and finance — the parliamentary aris-tocracy and gentry deliberately moved to reduce the competitiveness of politicseven if this meant confirming the supremacy of influence and patronage. Longparliamentary terms and uncontested elections opened the way to the England ofWalpole and Newcastle, the Scotland of the Dukes of Argyll.

This was the Britain, at once oligarchic and imperial, against which the Amer-ican Revolution was directed; and it is important for us to realize that its person-ality was a deeply divided one. The function of parliamentary oligarchy was tomaintain unity between government and landed society, that unity of the polit-ical nation without which there could be no government; but among the neces-sary means of doing this was the maintenance of a unity between government,commerce, and finance which was dynamic in its pursuit of mercantile, naval,and military empire and a specific role in the European power system. Everyperceptive observer of eighteenth-century reality recognized this harnessing ofthe static and the dynamic; the political nation desired stability more than em-pire, but pursued empire as a byproduct of its means of maintaining stability.Out of this there was in due time to emerge a kind of fixed law of modern Britishpolitics, that empire is to be yielded when it threatens the normal conduct ofpolitical competition — an experience unknown to Americans until very recently.But to eighteenth-century minds there was another and more immediate neces-sary consequence: the necessity of a sovereign Parliament. Whether one lookedat the need to maintain the unity of government and society, or at the need topursue the policies of war and empire, it was clear that executive and legislaturemust be linked by the same ties as those that bound the governing oligarchy tothe nation which it both ruled and represented; and, whether symbolically orpractically, the two most obviously necessary modes of this unity were legislativesupremacy and a politics of influence. The latter did as much as the former toroot executive in legislature and government in society.

This was the system to which the not altogether narrow political nation of theage of oligarchy was to find itself committed; but it was at once the strength andthe weakness of opposition ideology that it altogether denied this system's valid-ity. Here we encounter that quasi-republican alternative which I mentioned ear-lier, and to understand its origins and character we must return to the first En-glish Revolution. As early as 1642 it had been argued on behalf of the traditionalconstitution that King, Lords, and Commons corresponded to the monarchy,aristocracy, and democracy of a theoretical republican balance, and more vaguelyto the executive, judicial, and legislative powers; and that between them there


existed an equilibrium in which each was restrained by the other two from theexcess which led to degeneration.6 After 1649 it was contended that a hereditaryKing and Lords had proved harmful to the balance, and Harrington's Oceana is ablueprint for a balanced republic with no hereditary element; but the theory hadoriginally been advanced on behalf of the traditional constitution, and continuedto figure in its justification in 1660 and in 1688. Balance presupposed the inde-pendence of each of the three constituent parts, and it could be asserted thathereditary tenure effectively guaranteed the independence of a nonelected aristoc-racy, so long as these did not hold the Commons in dependence, which in a post-feudal society they no longer did. There were only two features of the eighteenth-century constitution which were really incompatible with the paradigm of bal-ance, and of these one was generally recognized, but the other hardly at all. Whatwas not well understood was that the independence of executive and legislaturefrom one another would not ultimately mesh with the indisputable fact that thelegislative authority was that of King-in-Parliament, executive in legislature, andmust ultimately collide with the principle of the sovereignty of Parliament. TheKing's ministers were not attacked for sitting in Parliament, but they were at-tacked for allegedly filling Parliament with the recipients of government patron-age. For what was universally acknowledged was that if the members of thelegislature became dependent upon patronage, the legislature would cease to beindependent and the balance of the constitution would become corrupt. Corrup-tion on an eighteenth-century tongue—where it was an exceedingly commonterm—meant not only venality, but disturbance of the political conditions nec-essary to human virtue and freedom.7 The only self-evident truth mentioned inPaine's Common Sense is that the King exercises despotic authority because he hasmonopolized parliamentary patronage.8 To us it may seem that this would nothave been self-evident even if it had been true, but to Paine's contemporaries itwas a necessary and inescapable consequence.9

The remarkable fact here—another of the profound cleavages in the Whigmind—is that though the conscious practice of the age was founded upon thenecessity of influence no less than upon the independence of property, its moraltheory was almost unanimous in declaring that the two were incompatible andthat corruption was fatal to virtue. The most sophisticated thinkers of the cen-tury—Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton—were those whoconceded that though patronage and the commercial society on which it rested

6 In His Majesty's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament (London, 1642); see Corinne C.Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).

7 J . G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), ch. 4.8 Philip S. Foner, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, N.J . , 1974), pp. 8, 116.9The revolutionary Paine was here only stating as a fact what the conservative Hume had predictedas a probability; see his essay, "Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Mon-archy or to a Republic" (Essays Moral, Political and Literary, VJA1).


must destroy virtue, the conditions of human life were such that virtue couldnever be fully realized, that it was dangerous to pretend otherwise, and thatalternative social values must be found. This was perhaps the most fundamentalproblem in eighteenth-century political and moral philosophy, but here is notthe place to pursue it;10 what matters more immediately is that we have foundthe ideological fault-line along which British and American political beliefs andpractices were to break apart.

There was a quasi-republican critique of parliamentary government which de-clared that corruption must be ended and the independence of the componentparts of the balance restored. This commonwealth or Country ideology11—thereare various names for it—was on both shores of the Atlantic considerably betterarticulated than was the defense of existing practice, but in the American coloniesit came to have an importance far greater than it ever possessed in Britain whereit originated. In England, and to a far lesser extent in Scotland, two groupsnormally excluded from the citadels of power—Tory gentlemen and Old Whigurban radicals, Bolingbroke at one extreme and Catherine Macaulay at another—perfected the critique of Whig oligarchy and patronage in the hope of mobilizingindependent country members against whatever ministry they were attacking.But such attempts almost invariably failed, with the last years of Queen Anne asthe only serious exception; and they failed not just because the country gentrywere as keen in the pursuit of influence as the next man, but because they had anunderstanding of their role in the parliamentary system a good deal more satisfy-ing than any they found in the commonwealth and Country ideology. The frontbenches were there to provide the King with ministers, the back benches to actas the grand jury of the nation; and there they sat, far better Tories than Boling-broke could ever be, stolidly supporting the ministry of the day because in thelast analysis it was the King's ministry, until there arose one of those very rareoccasions on which they could support it no more. The commonwealth or Coun-try ideology,12 of vast importance in the history of thought, was therefore of verylittle importance in the history of English practice; and I say that as one whoconsiders the life of the mind quite as important as the life of politics. But in theAmerican colonies, where political experience and practice were of a differentkind—where the intimate union of executive with legislature, of monarchy witharistocracy and gentry, of government with society, could not be duplicated inmicrocosm—it was another matter. The balance provincial, as Harrington had

10Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), chs. 13-15.11 Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Isaac F.

Krammick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge,Mass., 1968); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.,1967).

12The term "Commonwealth" suggests urban Old Whigs, the term "Country" Tory landowners; theideology is much the same whoever expresses it.


said, was not the balance domestic; and an ideology that presented parliamentarypractice as normally corrupt looked very different when it was a question first offearing, then of repudiating, the authority of Parliament itself.

Ill

There is no need to retell here the story of the 1760s and 1770s from the Amer-ican point of view. A galaxy of distinguished historians have explained how thecolonists found Parliament claiming to legislate for them in ways which theyfound unacceptable, and came as a result, after many crises and reversals of feel-ing, to discover and proclaim that they were no longer subjects of the King, evenin Parliament; and these historians have rightly moved on to consider the socialstructure and historical experience of the peoples who made this claim, and howit was that they came — as Edmund Burke, an Irishman, was one of the first toobserve13 — to constitute a distinctive nation which must be governed in its ownway. History is normally written in terms of national development, and a historyof divergence is written in terms of the development of divergent nationalities.But the value of considering the American Revolution as a British revolution isthat it obliges us to consider it in terms of a divergence of political styles withinwhat had been a common tradition, and so to ask how it happened that thedivergent nationalities acquired the political styles that they did. When Burkespoke in 1775 no one knew that there would be an independent America or howit would be governed, and the form of government it ultimately acquired wascertainly not the simple product of its autonomous experience. I have suggestedso far that the parliamentary institution could not take root under colonial con-ditions, and that the ideology of parliamentary opposition was sufficiently radicalin its criticism of the way in which the institution had developed to provideconceptual means of first repudiating and then replacing it. But the implicationseems plain that we must return to the history of the parliamentary institutionitself and reexamine its failure to deal with provincial government; a possiblequestion is whether this failure may have arisen from the circumstance that theinstitution itself was in a state of crisis.

The early part of the reign of George III was certainly one of confusion andabnormality in the politics of oligarchy. There had been, before the King's acces-sion, the wartime ministry of the elder Pitt, himself a figure dynamic and demagogicenough to cause discomfort to the Old Corps of Whigs, which had broughtunexpected global victories and an unlimited prospect of empire on the NorthAmerican continent. From the Stamp Act to the Quebec Act, the legislation towhich the colonies objected was designed to rationalize this empire and make itgovernable; and both the great contemporary historian David Hume14 and the13 In the Speech on Conciliation with America (1775).14J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Utters of David Hume (Oxford, 1932), II, 301.


great modern historian Sir Lewis Namier15 - neither of them English - made ittheir charge against Pitt, later Earl of Chatham, that he had saddled Britain withunlimited empire and then collapsed into irresponsibility at the height of thecrisis generated by its acquisition. Hume indeed thought that the empire shouldnever have been acquired at all, and I have no idea what Namier thought on thatsubject. But the implication is plain at least that empire was contingent and notnecessary to the purposes of British government. Pitt had not conquered the St.Lawrence and the Ohio to open the way to Daniel Boone and George RogersClark; an empire of settlement was of less interest than controlling the riverineaspects of a system of Atlantic commerce. Americans were indeed beginning tosay that the empire of settlement would be theirs and would some day transferthe seat of government from Britain across the Atlantic; and deep in such expres-sions of manifest destiny, the dim outlines of what might have become a strugglefor British independence can be sighted. Chatham once declared that the dayParliament ceased to be supreme over America, he would advise every gentlemanto sell his lands and emigrate to that country; the greater partner, he said, mustever control the less.16 More immediately, England was the ruling partner andthe roots of Parliament were in English landed and commercial society. It wasthis which was to render conciliation with the colonies ultimately impossible.

A further cause of disruption in the normal conduct of parliamentary politicshad been the ministerial initiative taken, soon after his accession, by the youngGeorge III and his friend Lord Bute. The meaning of this has been intensivelydebated, but it seems clear that the King had no intention of overthrowing theoligarchical order and no means of doing so; and though his private as well as hispublic rhetoric is somewhat flavored by the language of Tory opposition, it wasto prove important that he had certainly no intention of coming forward as that"patriot king" which was Bolingbroke's final contribution to the ideology ofseparated powers. But in driving Pitt and then Newcastle from office, the Kingand Lord Bute overplayed their hand sufficiently to provoke both Whig andradical — not to mention Tory — opposition. Radical displeasure erupted in Lon-don and took the form of the Wilkite movement; and the circumstance thatGeorge's chief adviser for a year or two was a Scot, and a Stuart into the bargain,produced a wave of venomous anti-Scottish chauvinism, such as lay always at theroots of eighteenth-century opposition, and regrettably reappears in the writingsof both Adams17 and Jefferson18 years later. Radical opposition — which was15 Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution, 2nd ed. (London, 1961), pp. 159—60.16Max Beloff (ed.), The Debate on the American Revolution (London, 1949), p. 102 (from Chatham

Correspondence, n, 369—72). See also "Josiah Tucker," Chap. 9, this volume.17John Adams, Autobiography (The Adams Papers, ed. L. H. Butterfield {Cambridge, Mass., 1961],

m, 352): "an insolent, arbitrary Scotch faction, with a Bute and a Mansfield at their head for aministry . . . "

18 See Jefferson's drafts for the Declaration of Independence: "Not only soldiers of our common blood,but Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us . . ." Carl Becker, The Declaration ofIndependence (New York, 1933), pp. 169, 172.


necessarily popular in the sense that it was outside the intimate proceedings ofoligarchical politics — automatically took the form of an outcry against corrup-tion, and the King, who had set out with some vague idea of reducing thearistocracy's control over patronage, found himself tagged as its chief upholder.It was much easier to denounce the influence of the Crown when the Crownproposed to exert that influence with the aid of advisers whom neither radicalsnor aristocrats liked.

When Bute left the scene, George III punctiliously sought his ministers withinthe established world of English politics; but his own activities, coupled withthose of the opposition in the streets of London, Boston, and Philadelphia, werebringing the oligarchy into a state of disarray from which it did not fully recover.Chatham's retreat into psychic instability was an accident of personality; but SirLewis Namier's detestation of Edmund Burke - which ran very deep indeed -was in part the effect of his belief that Burke's rhetoric escalated into a moral andconstitutional issue the perfectly natural desire of a Whig faction to return topower. The point, however, about the Rockingham Whigs — a rather inarticulategroup whom Burke served in the role of hyperarticulate genius — is that theysimply did not know what to do with power when they had it; and when in duecourse the King found in Lord North a minister who could hold Parliamenttogether, he was merely filling a vacuum left by the inefficacy of Whig politi-cians. Though it may not show up in their day-to-day maneuverings within theworld of high politics, these were caught between two fires. They could not runwith the London, country, and American radicals whose denunciations of corrup-tion were increasingly turned against aristocracy as well as Crown; and this de-prived them of one of their normal rhetorical means of attacking a ministry theydid not like. They would never have made very good leaders of a Country move-ment, and in the era of Jack Wilkes and Sam Adams — insofar as they knew aboutthe latter — they did not even want to try. The case for Burke's Thoughts on thePresent Discontents, if there is one, is that he was looking for an alternative rhetoricto that of the commonwealth ideology; to his formidable critic Catherine Macau-lay, however, it seemed that he was merely watering down the language of theradical tradition.

A simple dialectic would suggest as the outcome of this situation a wave ofreform originating with leaders out of doors;19 but in Britain this did not hap-pen, whereas in the American colonies it did. The two phenomena are of coursediscontinuous: only externally and rhetorically were the American radicals a Countrymovement originating in the context of British politics, and they made it theiraim not to reform Parliament, but to repudiate its authority. But it is of vastimportance in the setting of American history that they found the only ideolog-ical means of doing this to entail the assertion that the parliamentary institution

19John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George HI (Cambridge, 1976).


itself was corrupt-not just accidentally, but inherently - and must be replacedby drawing upon the quasi-republican alternatives supplied by the oppositiontradition. And one cannot consider the political culture of the Founding Fatherswithout discovering that the language of commonwealth ideology, however in-adequate as a rhetorical tool in parliamentary Britain, offered superlative intel-lectual equipment for debating the problems of eighteenth-century politics andsociety, and for founding institutions which have endured. The Nixon Admin-istration was immolated on altars originally built by the Old Whigs; and theknives were still sharp.

In the context of British history, however, to which the view of 1776 as aBritish revolution commits us, we have to ask not only why there was a revolu-tion against Parliament in the American colonies, but what this means in termsof the history of Parliament itself. Is there, for instance, any deep relationshipbeween the attempts to legislate for the colonies in the 1760s and the ministerialupheavals which followed the intervention of Bute and George III? It seems plau-sible to suggest that there was not - that more or less any ministry might havestarted legislating for America with no sense of doing anything out of the ordi-nary — but we continue to find the thought enticing that more stable ministriesmight have proved less stubborn and might have desisted before the crisis becameirremediable. There persist, both in American and in British thinking, variousforms of nostalgia (the reasons for their existence are themselves historically in-teresting) which continue to suggest that the severance of America from Britainmight, and almost should, have been avoided. I cannot imagine that these feel-ings run very deep, and my main reason here is a firm conviction that parliamen-tary institutions and a continental empire of settlement were, in no long run,incompatible. But a subsidiary theme of this nostalgia on the American side isthe will to believe that the loss of America was a terrible shock to the Britishnations and marked a profound crisis in the stability of their governing institu-tions. It seems important to explain, in conclusion, some reasons for thinkingthat this was not the case at all; that the loss of America was an effect of thestability of eighteenth-century politics, much more than of their instability or ofthe fact that they were beginning to change, and was accepted in a way whichdid their stability no harm at all.

IV

If there was a moment at which an American Revolution became inevitable, itwas the moment at which it became unalterable that the colonies thought ofthemselves as (to use a phrase of the time) "perfect states," which must - demo-cratically or otherwise — generate legislative governments with all the attributesof sovereignty. Perhaps this did not happen until 1776, when they declared


themselves "states" and set about just such a pursuit of sovereignty in formallyrevolutionary terms; but a powerful cause in precipitating this Revolution wasthe discovery that sovereignty was indeed legislative and was therefore unshara-ble. The British had always been perfectly clear that this was the case, and thatParliament must legislate for the colonies if it had any claim to govern them atall; but we all know that the ideological history of the Revolution consists largelyof the extraordinary difficulty with which Americans brought themselves to ac-knowledge this self-evident truth. Because they began with believing themselvesto be British, living under a free constitution, they supposed themselves to enjoythe civil rights, the constitutional liberties, the political virtues, and the naturalfreedoms that went with it; and so indeed they did, until they began trying toplead these things against the supremacy of Parliament. Then they discoveredhow far away Parliament really was and how little they understood that institu-tion or those whose lives were intimately bound up with it. The British, exceptinsofar — and it was to a considerable extent — as their thinking was confused bythe commonwealth ideology of separated powers, had a very clear understandingthat liberty depended upon the supremacy of Parliament, upon its legislativesovereignty (perhaps symbolic rather than active), and upon the continuation ofa government of influence and patronage. The great American discovery was tobe that the commonwealth ideology provided many of the conceptual bases for anew and successful form of government, but this came about only after it hadhelped render a revolution inevitable by delaying their recognition of the revo-lutionary nature of what they were asking. Perhaps this is why one of the first tocall for revolutionary independence was Thomas Paine - an Englishman in someways closer to Puritan and Cromwellian than to Whig or even Old Whig waysof thought.

When the Americans and some of their supporters argued that the King shouldoffer his protection to a number of legislatures virtually equal with one another,Lord North observed that the argument was that of a Tory.20 When Jefferson, inA Summary View of the Rights of British America, virtually invited George III toassume the role of Bolingbroke's "patriot king," who dealt with Parliament in-dependently of the channels provided by ministers, their connections, and theirinfluences, he invited him to deal in this way with an indefinite number of par-liaments at the same time. We know that George never had the intention ofacting as a patriot king, and it seems in the highest degree unlikely that Jeffersonthought he was going to; the strategy of the Summary View is surely to offer theKing a role in order to denounce him for refusing it. But the reason why Georgecould never be a patriot king is also the reason why a plurality of legislatures wasan impossibility under eighteenth-century conditions. He never thought of mov-ing outside the established patterns of oligarchical politics because he knew,2 0 G. H. Gutteridge, English Wbiggism and the American Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963),

p. 62.


without having to think about it, that the only way to govern Britain was forhim to find ministers who could sustain his government in Parliament (his errors,which were many, did no more than raise a few questions about the monarch'spersonal role in finding and maintaining ministries) and that this could not bedone unless there was a consistent and exacting symbiosis between King, minis-ters, and the two houses; one in which influence, patronage, and touchy personalrelationships required constant attention; one which certainly could not be sus-tained with more than one truly sovereign legislature at a time. This was whythe Parliament of Scotland had been absorbed in 1707; and Josiah Tucker, themost astute of conservative English observers of the American crisis, drew theconclusion that a separate Irish Parliament had become intolerable.21 There wasno middle way between legislative union and legislative independence; Irelandmust be drawn into union, America must become independent. Tucker's advicefor Ireland was not taken till twenty years and a bloodbath later; but that is aboutthe norm for Irish history.

There were conservative as well as radical reasons why Englishmen shouldwelcome American independence, and the former of these were very like thereasons for supporting American subjugation. Our thinking on these matters isoften confused by the memory of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuryBritish Commonwealth, in which independent legislatures under the same Crownproved to be perfectly feasible; but what needs stressing about that by now some-what unreal association is that it came into being at a time when electoral poli-tics, both British and colonial, had become more democratic and less dependenton the exercise of influence by the Crown. Under the conditions of the age ofoligarchy nothing of the kind was feasible. Since we know that English radicalsin the age of the American Revolution were demanding a wider franchise and areduction of influence, we vaguely feel that they were demanding both whatmight have rendered the Revolution unnecessary and what Americans were de-manding for themselves. But such thinking is not very exact. In April 1777,Edmund Burke wrote to his constituents at Bristol:

But if the colonies (to bring the general matter home to us) could see that in Great Britainthe mass of the people are melted into its government, and that every dispute with theministry must of necessity be always a quarrel with the nation, they can stand no longerin the equal and friendly relations of fellow-citizens to the subjects of this kingdom.22

Burke was talking about what he hoped would not happen; he was attemptingboth a tortuous justification of the Rockinghams' withdrawal from Parliamentand a protest against the wartime state of mind. But there is a deeper meaning21A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies and Dis-

carding them Entirely (Gloucester, 1776), pp. 57-58 . The point is repeatedly made in Tucker'sworks; he insists that a plurality of independent legislatures can lead only to Tory consequences.

22 "A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol," in A. J. George, ed., Edmund Burke: Speeches on the AmericanWar (Boston, 1891), p. 194.


to his words. Since the summer of the preceding year the Americans had in factbeen engaged in a quarrel with the British nation — they had declared as muchin a public document now dated July 4, 1776 — and a reason for this state ofaffairs was that, even in the age of oligarchy, there was a real sense in which themass of the people was melted into its government. Those out of office mighthave a quarrel with the ministry, but they must support the sovereignty of itsParliament; those excluded from the franchise might have a quarrel with theoligarchy, but it was in Parliament that they must seek representation. The par-liamentary institution had taken root in the nation, and influence was for thepresent among the means implanting it there. These conditions had not beenestablished in America, and nobody had ever thought of ways of implantingthem.

This was why no British politician - certainly not Burke - had ever envisageda solution of the colonial problem which did not involve the ultimate sovereigntyof Parliament; Burke had only said that Parliament should refrain from exercisingit. This was why Burke and his friends found themselves totally powerless inpolitics; the political nation was supporting its Parliament as usual. And this waswhy neither the war against the Americans, nor the peace which consented totheir independence, was so overwhelmingly unpopular as to threaten the stabilityof institutions; you might almost say that the sovereignty of Parliament was theend to be sustained, and that subjecting an empire or letting it go were but twoways of doing it. If- to borrow language from leaders of the historical profession- Plumb's "growth of oligarchy" was the remedy found in the eighteenth centuryfor the problems occasioned by Stone's "crisis of the aristocracy" in the seven-teenth, it might seem that the loss of an empire was a high price to pay forinstitutional stability. But the empire was surrendered, and the stability of insti-tutions maintained. There is this to be said for the old and misleading adageabout the British empire being "acquired in a fit of absence of mind": the Britishare more interested in maintaining than in expanding themselves (and will alwayslet their overseas loyalists go when it suits them). By way of contrast, let us thinkfor one moment about the Northwest Ordinance, about Jefferson's "empire ofliberty," about Clay and Monroe, Jackson and Polk; and we shall realize theparadox that the new republic, born of the revolt against empire, had a commit-ment to empire — and to empire of settlement — built into its structure in a waythat the parent system never had. The American Revolution was, among otherthings, the greatest revolt of white settlers since the Decline and Fall of theRoman Empire, which it did not otherwise resemble; for the Romans allowedthemselves to become absorbed by their own empire, and the British never madethat mistake.

It may seem that I am giving somewhat too conservative an interpretation ofthe radical tensions of mid-Georgian England; but the immediate future lay with


conservatism. The attempts at parliamentary reform made in the 1780s had es-sentially failed before the French Revolution and the great reaction against it;and it can be argued that one reason for their failure was that the commonwealthideology, on which their rhetoric was still founded, was by now visibly out oftouch wih reality. According to conventional reforming wisdom, corruption haddestroyed the balance of the constitution, and its principles must be restored bya return to its uncorrupt democratic component. But the nation had just passedthrough a painful and inglorious war to maintain its parliamentary institutionsas it understood them, and neither radical, nor Tory, nor American argumentscould stand against that. The election of 1784 marked the end of the old style ofopposition, as the political system turned decisively toward a minister — theyounger Pitt — who could hold power, and who looked as if he could conductreforms, on terms which held the parliamentary institution together. Burke man-aged to be on the losing side as usual, but his ideology had the future before it.There could be no return to first principles, he said, within a prescriptive system.It is not without significance that he had first enunciated his hatred of doctrinairepolitics in order to castigate ministers for opening up the problem of coloniallegislation when there existed no answer to it.

But across the Atlantic, the republic born of the great revolution against Par-liament was engaged in the return to first principles because there was nowhereelse to go. On discovering that parliamentary government had never includedthem, they had turned to the quasi-republican alternative which the parliamen-tary tradition had brought them, and were now studying the commonwealthideology in all its intellectual richness in the attempt to get themselves a form ofgovernment. This is not the place to speak of the extraordinary ingenuity withwhich they transformed their intellectual legacy as they thought suited thembest. But we can understand the depth and bitterness with which Hamilton wasaccused of wanting to restore the British form of government,23 if we reflect thatthe repudiation of Parliament entailed the idea that it was founded upon execu-tive corruption. Since Hamilton wanted a strong executive, with a base in publiccredit and a supply of political patronage, he must be plotting to restore themonarchy and hereditary aristocracy; these truths were, very nearly, self-evident.But Hamilton's spirit went marching on, past this particular misunderstanding,and the final paradox of this episode in British history remains to be noted. Inthe course of the nineteenth century, parliamentary monarchy democratized andreformed itself, in ways which may well have entailed a restatement of the prin-ciple of oligarchy but did involve the elimination of most of the classic andfamiliar forms of patronage, influence, and corruption. Democratic federalismgrew into the greatest empire of patronage and influence the world has known,23 Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, 1970); Lance

Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca, N.Y. , 1978).


and remains to this day dedicated to the principle that politics cannot work unlesspoliticians do things for their friends and their friends know where to find them.New democrat is but old Whig writ large; and the Federal Constitution, thatgreat triumph of the eighteenth-century political art, seems to have perpetuatedthe eighteenth-century world it was designed to deal with. Far more than Trol-lope's Duke of Omnium, Richard Nixon was a figure of the Old Whig politicalimagination. Far from his being an anomaly within the American political tra-dition, the only aspect of his downfall that would have surprised a FoundingFather is that his was the only presidency to end in removal for causes shown inthe space of two hundred years. But do not our governing assumptions determinerealities? America may have guaranteed the survival of the forms of corruption itwas created to resist.

PART II

Modes of political and historicaltime in early eighteenth-century

England

History - in all but a few, rather esoteric, senses of the term - is public time.That is, it is time experienced by the individual as public being, conscious of aframework of public institutions in and through which events, processes andchanges happened to the society of which he perceives himself to be part.

The public realm, unlike the social realm, must be conceived as institution-alized and formalized, since otherwise the distinction between public and privatecannot be maintained; and the institutionalization of the public realm leads tothe institutionalization of social experience and of modes of apprehending it, andconsequently to the institutionalization and differentiation of apprehended time.To say that "history is public time," therefore, is to say that individuals who seethemselves as public beings see society as organized into and by a number offrameworks, both institutional and conceptual, in and through which they ap-prehend things as happening to society and themselves, and which provide themwith means of differentiating and organizing the things they apprehend as hap-pening. This is why the archaic dictum that "history is past politics" has moreto be said for it than we are disposed to recognize, and why the history of histo-riography is to so large an extent part of the history of political discourse.

There are a number of ways of classifying the conceptual frameworks by whichpeople order their consciousness of public time. One may classify them profes-sionally and institutionally, in such a way as to suggest that the law provides oneordering of time, the church another, parliament a third and so on; but ineighteenth-century England such orderings and their languages had drawn to-gether to a point where it seems truer to say that time and history were orderedby consciousness of a public realm or political nation, which could itself be or-

From Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 5, edited by Ronald C. Rosbottom for the AmericanSociety for Eighteenth-Century Studies, pp. 87-102. © 1976 University of Wisconsin Press; re-printed by permission.

91


dered and conceptualized in a number of different ways. A preferable mode ofclassification, therefore, may be one which enumerates different ways in which apolitical society may order consciousness of its existence in time and of time asthe dimension of its existence. This classification can be arranged around twodominant notions, that of continuity and that of contingency. Under continuitywe may see society describing itself as perpetuating its usages and practices,transmitting its different forms of authority and, in these and other ways, main-taining its legitimacy.1 Society will be seen as a complex of institutions and asan institutionalized whole; and its continuity as a whole will be predominantlydefined in terms of the modes of continuity characteristic of those institutionsheld to be peculiarly important to its structure. Under the heading of contin-gency, however, we become aware of other and less institutionalized phenomena.We are in the domain of fortune, as it used to be called: of the unpredictablecontingencies and emergencies which challenge the human capacity to apprehendand to act, and which may appear either exterior or interior to the institutionalstructure of society.2 In either case, however, what is institutionalized is now thecapacity to act in response to contingency, and the institutional structure is nowa continuous capacity for action rather than a continuous transmission of legiti-macy - a change of emphasis which cannot but operate to diminish institution-ality and render the institutional more of a short-term response to contingencythan it was before.

When time is the dimension of continuity, the institutional structure is seenas successfully creating its own time — though if it is fully successful in doing so,this will by no means be the same as creating its own future, but rather ensuringthat no future ever comes into existence. When time is the dimension of contin-gency, the structure is seen as striving to maintain itself in a time not created byit, but rather given to it by some agency, purposive or purposeless, not yetdefined. It may succeed or fail in maintaining itself; and if it succeeds, this maymean that it succeeds in preserving its own existence in the midst of a history itdoes not otherwise modify, or that it succeeds in imposing itself on exterior timeand re-creating the latter in the image of its own continuity - thus absorbinghistory into itself - or that it succeeds in adapting itself, together with its owncontinuities and their time-dimensions, to exterior contingencies and their his-tories, while at the same time imposing its changing continuities on exteriorcontingencies in such a way as to bring about a dialectical relationship between

lJ. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1957); "Time, Institutions and Action: An Essay on Traditions and their Understanding,"in Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971); "Modes of Action and their Pasts inTudor and Stuart England," in Orest Ranum, ed., National Consciousness, History and Political Cul-ture in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

2 J . G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

Modes of political and historical time 93

continuity and contingency, the political society and history. To the student ofthe patterns of historical consciousness that arise in these ways, the importantquestion to determine is that of what the time-creating agencies are — institu-tional or extra-institutional, human or extra-human - and whether they act toperpetuate simple continuities, to perpetuate simple domains of contingency, orto create new futures.

As English political and historical thought — to which I shall here confinemyself — passes from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, we encountersome interesting and important case studies of this order. We seem - though itis possible to overstate this point - to be passing out of a period in which it wasgenerally supposed that contingent time and its events were the creation of God,and that the history thus created was more than merely contingent, in the sensenot only that faith in the goodness of providence entailed our believing that ithad a pattern we did not know, but also that belief in the content of revealedprophecy gave us certain keys to the pattern of its eschatological climax. Toseventeenth-century intellects, the fulfillment of types by antitypes, or the literalor symbolic fulfillment of specific prophecies, could be utilized, in expectation,to build up scenarios for sacred futures, in the movement towards which favoredsecular societies might realize their history as latter-day Israels. But in the wakeof the Puritan failure England - if not New England - had opted for a lessprophetic form of religion which made less demand for an Elect Nation;3 and themillennial and messianic projections of the sacred future, which had formed soimportant a constituent of secular historical consciousness, seem to have survivedmainly in the form described by Tuveson in Millennium and Utopia, where thelong-standing tendency to see the millennium as the resurrection of mankind'sAdamic potential had led to its being described as the rational and even scientificperfection of human society in a future no less secular for being providential. Thiskind of religiose progressivism figures in eighteenth-century thought, but not asone of its major political rhetorics; one is tempted to call it the opium of theUnitarians, though the idea of a providentially ordained increase of rationalitywas not without its contribution to the formation of associationist Utopias.4

At the other end of the cosmic scale from that at which God created thephenomena of time from the standpoint of a nunc-stans which knew no future,traditional thought had located the humblest and least rational or sacred - though

3 William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (New York: Columbia University Press,1963); William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-1660 (London: Macmillan andCo., 1969).

4 Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1949); Jack Fruchtman, Jr . , The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study inLate Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism. Transactions of the American PhilosophicalSociety, vol. 73, pt. 4 (Philadelphia: 1983).


far from the least important — of the time-creating agencies: that "custom" whichwas "recorded and registered nowhere but in the memory of the people."5 Foundedupon the individual's ability to recall and summarize his own experience and topresume its continuity with the experience transmitted to him as that of hisancestors, this conception had generated two distinct but closely-linked ideolog-ical patterns. The first of these was the ideology of the Ancient Constitution,properly so called: the elaborate set of historical arguments by which it was soughtto show that the common law, and the constitution as it now stood, had beenessentially the same since pre-Conquest times and - if the argument were pressedhome - since time immemorial, or at least since an unrecorded beginning in thewoods of Germany. The second, which could, though with difficulty, be ex-pressed without reference to the first, was the more highly sophisticated philos-ophy of prescriptive conservatism outlined by Sir Matthew Hale after the Resto-ration and perfected by Burke a century and a quarter later. This emphasized thatin a purely traditional system, where everything was known simply by the factof its transmission, there was no more to be known concerning any institutionalfact than that it must be presumed continuous with some antecedent fact or setcf circumstances. Consequently, we could never locate a customary institution inany context, whether of universal laws or contingent circumstances, which mightpermit of its being evaluated or compared with what had been done under othercircumstances - we might only accept it, on grounds which entailed acceptanceof the whole complex of traditions or transmitting institutions from which itcame.

These two ideological constructs, it should be noticed, entailed two images ofpublic time, sharply opposed yet as intimately connected as the two faces ofJanus. In the one, time appeared as pure transmission, the image and perpetua-tion of a past in which was contained, yet contained without a beginning, every-thing which was needed by way of an institutional complex — somewhat as Cru-soe finds on the wreck everything he can want, without knowing how it gotthere. In the other, each moment in the creation and transmission of a customcould be depicted in such a way that the stress on the absence of beginnings madeit possible to speak of each act as at once uniquely itself and perfectly continuouswith all that had gone before it. The custom-creating people were now housedwholly within the continuity of their own transmission, and it became possibleto speak of each act as uniquely theirs, performed in and out of their own historicindividuality "as the silkworm spinneth all her web out of herself only."6 It isthe paradox of custom in Old Western thought that it deals with the wholly

5 Sir John Davies, Irish Reports (London, 1674), preface dedicatory, unpaginated. See The AncientConstitution and the Feudal Law, pp. 33-34 , and for the antithesis between custom and the nunc-stans, The Machiavellian Moment, chs. 1-2.

6Davies, Irish Reports; Ancient Constitution, pp. 33—34.


particular by making it appear wholly continuous, immemorial and self-creating;and part of the paradox is that the philosophy of custom has helped to generatethe philosophy of historicism.

This way of thinking, however, while far from extinct at the beginning of theeighteenth century - and massively revived in a changed form by Edmund Burkeat the end of it - had during the second half of the seventeenth undergone severeand damaging challenge from the resurgence of feudal studies, which had pro-duced an image of the Norman-through-Plantagenet past as historically autono-mous in the sense that it was founded upon a web of social relations which couldbe studied in detail and shown to be structurally unlike anything prevailing ineither the antiquity which had preceded it or the modernity which had taken itsplace. The feudalization of the middle period of English and Western history —as it may be called — had produced two sharply differing ideological polemics, inthe debate between which much of the significant historiographical activity ofthe eighteenth century goes on, and which may be compared in respect of thestructures of institutionalized time to which each gave rise.

The first polemic — Tory at the time of its inception in the 1680s, but suc-cessfully taken over by the Whigs some twenty years later — was authoritarian inits implications and in due course gave rise to a kind of presentistic conservatism.(The ugliness of this adjective is the result of our having no familiar or elegantterm for thought which uses the uniqueness of the present as a source for politicalauthority; "modernist," while slightly less abrasive, probably carries too manyirrelevant connotations.) This line of argument emphasized that neither law norparliament nor constitution was immemorial, and consequently that none couldmake claims against the sovereign authority on grounds of its supposed priorantiquity. Filmerian advocates of divinely appointed hereditary monarchy couldof course go on to argue that if the constitution was not immemorial the kingshipitself was, being rooted not in mere custom but in patriarchal and even Adamicantiquity and an original divine sanction. But after 1688 this argument—whichhad been widely but not monolithically adopted by Tories - became harder tomaintain and the appeal to a feudal past was seen as carrying conservative impli-cations of another and a less antiquarian kind. If the constitution constantlyunderwent historical change — from pre-feudal to feudal to post-feudal — it wouldfollow that it contained no principles of antiquity on which claims either to oragainst authority might be based; and consequently the case for sovereignty be-came the case for some final, uncontrollable and in this sense absolute authorityto which appeal might be made in fluctuating and lawless circumstances, andwhich was above the law for the simple reason that no law which might limit itcould otherwise be found.7 This was rather the case for sovereignty than the case

7 The Machiavellian Moment, chs. 13-14. This interpretation replaces that stated in the concludingchapter of The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, where it was suggested that belief in the


for divine right; on grounds which were in their own way historicist it lookedback to the de facto controversy of 1649 and after, to Hobbes, who was in somemeasure a participant in that debate,8 and to those pioneer "bourgeois" and "lib-eral" theorists — these are not adjectives which I find specially illuminating —who had begun to argue that a sovereign was necessary because men in the pursuitof their natural freedom imposed bargains on one another to the limit of theirpower. This argument was present is t to the extent that it denied that any morallyregulating principle was immanent in time, and saw nothing but the momentand its strategies as providing the context in which the effort to moralize andregulate must be made. There also seems to have been a fairly clear ideologicalassociation between the use of this argument and the tendency to see the economyas consisting in exchange rather than inheritance; the early economic individual-ists were all theorists of sovereignty, whether they believed that the sovereignshould regulate the actors in the economy or should laisser les aller. It was in parton the question of commerce that presentist sovereignty, in its Whig phase, wasto become the opponent of the second polemic, to which I now turn.

This second polemic founded on the feudalization of the past had a career evenmore complicated than the first. In party terms, it moved from Whig to a com-bination of Old Whig and Tory; in terms of content, it originated with thespecialized brand of anti-Normanism — or more precisely anti-Gothicism — em-ployed by James Harrington, under the Protectorate, to suggest that the AncientConstitution was feudal and outmoded, and therefore ripe for revolutionary trans-formation. For Harrington, there were no organizing principles immanent in theEnglish past; what he called "ancient prudence" was Spartan and Roman, a com-monwealth of armed freeholders which had been corrupted and feudalized byemperors and their Gothic mercenaries, but might now be restored to its trueprinciple in England in consequence of the decay of military tenures.9 This wasto place England at a crucial point on an agrarian version of the Polybian cycle ofconstitutions, a vision of time more Hellenic than Christian, but to make thatpoint a Machiavellian occasione at which there was opportunity to escape fromhistory into the timeless stability of a true republic. By invoking cyclical im-agery, Harrington invoked also the idea of a set of organizing principles, fromwhich there could be only degeneration and to which there must be return; buthe integrated English history into the classic cycle, and by insisting that freedommust be rooted in individual autonomy, itself rooted in the individual's posses-

antiquity of the constitution reigned supreme after 1688. See also Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke

and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age ofWalpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1968).8Quentin Skinner, "Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,"

in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum: The Quest for a Settlement, 1646-1660 (Hamden, Conn.:Archon Books, 1972).

9 Ancient Constitution, ch. 6; Politics, Language and Time, ch. 4; The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 11.


sion of land, he further kept alive the time-structure of the natural economy, inwhich property was better if inherited than if exchanged. His successors, the so-called neo-Harringtonians,10 retained the essentials of his time-scheme, but re-versed the pattern of his history; re-affirming in the conditions of the Restorationthe orthodox ideology of the Ancient Constitution, they located the stable com-monwealth of armed freeholders in a Gothic and parliamentary past, and imposedupon the present the burden of escaping corruption. The principles which mustbe preserved if corruption were to be avoided — the principles of republicanbalance - were now imputed to the English past, and the Ancient Constitutiondepicted as an equilibrium of king, lords and commons. To maintain the inher-itance of immemorial custom now became the necessary means of escaping theanakuklosis.

We might term this a process of classicization. The principles - balance in theconstitution, virtue and independence in the individual - on which the politymust rest were now represented as a stable and stabilizing structure, located inthe past as a source of legitimacy, and any movement from them was representedas degeneration. The classical politics in Western thought included by this timethe disturbing suggestion, made by Machiavelli, that since virtue was action, itmust sooner or later alter the conditions on which it rested and so render itselfimpossible; but eighteenth-century classicism seldom conveyed Machiavellian ideasin their full dynamism and rigor, and intimations of political mortality usuallytook the form, first of hints that no system of virtue could hope to endure forever,and second of warnings that the process of corruption, once begun, was almostimpossible to check, even by the one known cure of drastic return to the consti-tution's original principles. The stakes were high when the individual was en-gaged in the practice of civic virtue, for he must commit his entire moral person-ality to the preservation of a classic ideal amidst a history not inherently friendlyto it. If the individual was to be virtuous, he must live in a virtuous city; in acorrupt city, the individual himself must be corrupted.

The historical scene was rendered far more precarious by the late seventeenthcentury's realization that the personal autonomy, necessary if the individual wasto practice virtue in a republic, needed a material foundation in the form ofproperty. If the function of property was to confer independence on the individ-ual, it must involve him in as few as possible contingent relations with otherindividuals; and the ideal form of property thus came to appear the inheritablefreehold or fee simple in land, on which the Roman or Gothic citizen warrior hadbased his capacity for self-defense and self-government. But this ideal existed inthe past. By the closing decade of the seventeenth century English and Scottishsocial critics were increasingly disturbed by the rise of professional armies, in

10 Politics, Language and Time, chs. 3 -4 ; The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 12.


which the citizen alienated the vital function of self-defense to a hired and banausicspecialist, and thus became in some measure corrupt; and it had already beenperceived that what enabled him to take this fatal step was the increased circu-lation of goods and money, which enabled him to pay a substitute to defend himwhile he both enjoyed the benefits of an expanding culture and accumulatedfurther riches as the means to further enjoyment. But what soon became knownas "the progress of the arts" was an irreversible process, whether one thought ofit as the expansion of culture or as the corruption of virtue; the uncomplicatedRoman or Gothic world lay far in the past; and profound changes were beginningto occur in Western man's understanding of history, as a result of the perceptionthat economic and cultural growth must be thought of as both progress andcorruption. Culture and liberty, it began to appear, were ultimately incompati-ble; the Goths were both despicable as artists and admirable as freemen; and whatraised man above the condition of the savage must ultimately sink him below thelevel of the citizen. Man's quarrel with his own history, that most characteristicfeature of the modern mind, may be dated in England from about the foundationof the National Debt. And should anyone wish to challenge my use of the mas-culine gender, I will point out that the classical ideal in politics and history wasstill a profoundly masculine way of thinking, and that its perception of the fem-inine was part of the crisis in awareness which I am seeking to explore.

The National Debt was a device permitting English society to maintain andexpand its government, army and trade by mortgaging its revenues in the future.This was sufficient to make it the paradigm of a society now living to an increas-ing degree by speculation and by credit: that is to say, by men's expectations ofone another's capacity for future action and performance. Since a credit mecha-nism was an expansive and dynamic social device, the beliefs men had to formand maintain concerning one another were more than simple expectations of an-other's capacity to pay what he had borrowed, to perform what he had promised;they were boomtime beliefs, obliging men to credit one another with capacity toexpand and grow and become what they were not. Far more than the practice oftrade and profit, even at their most speculative, the growth of public creditobliged capitalist society to develop as an ideology something society had neverpossessed before, the image of a secular and historical future. Without belief inthe progress of the arts, the investing mercantile society literally could not main-tain itself.

But in what was belief in such a future to be rooted? Not in experience, sincethere is no way of experiencing a future; not in reason, since reason based on theperception of nature cannot well predict the exercise of capacities that have notyet been developed; not in Christian faith, since the most apocalyptic of proph-ecies is not concerned to reveal the future state of the market. There remainedimagination, fantasy or passion; and Augustan social thought is visibly obsessedat times by the spectacle of a society advancing at high speed into a world it can


only imagine as existing in the forms which it may desire. Not only must thespeculative society maintain and govern itself by perpetually gambling on its ownwish-fulfillments; a new dimension was added to that dependence of all men uponall men which thinkers in the classical tradition wished desperately to avoid -though Christian and Hobbesian thinkers alike rather welcomed it — by theimminence of a state of affairs in which not only was every man in debt to everyother man, but every man was judged and governed, at every moment, by othermen's opinion of the probability that not he alone, but generations yet unborn,would be able and willing to repay their debts at some future date which mightnever even arrive. Men, it seemed, were governed by opinion, and by opinion asto whether certain governing fantasies would ever become realized.11

If the speculative society constantly gave itself credit for attaining levels ofwealth, power and satisfaction which it had not yet achieved, and so sought toadvance towards them, it constantly sought to transform itself by actualizing theimaginable but not predictable. Now it is an evident fact in the history andsociology of inter-sexual perception that masculine minds constantly symbolizethe changeable, the unpredictable and the imaginative as feminine, though whythey do so I would rather be excused from explaining. The random and therecurrent, the lunar and the cyclical, were summarized by Roman and Renais-sance minds in the figure of Fortuna, who symbolizes both the history in whichthe republic endeavors to maintain itself, and the contingent with which virtue —that obviously virile quality — contends. It frequently occurs, in that Augustanjournalism concerned with evaluating the impact of public credit upon society,that Credit is symbolized as a goddess having the attributes of the Renaissancegoddess Fortune, and even more than she equated with fantasy, passion and dy-namic change.12 She stands for that future which can only be sought passionatelyand inconstantly, and for the hysterical fluctuations of the urge towards it. Thereseems to be an important link between capitalism and romanticism in this re-newed feminization of time and of the process of actualization of fantasies onwhich - though never quite completed - the speculative society depends.

The Augustan political journalists - Defoe, Steele, Addison, Mandeville -display an uneasy concern with the increasingly visible public role of women,and it would appear that this is connected with their increasing perception of thegrowth of credit finance. Defoe and Addison both employ a female figure todenote the idea that the credit mechanism has endowed society with an exces-sively hysterical nervous system, and both suggest solutions in terms of whatMontesquieu was later to describe as the conversion of credit into confiance.13 Thatis, credit was no longer to fluctuate wildly with the hopes and fears of the invest-

11 For detail see The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 13. I would not now use the word "Augustan" soconfidently; see pp. 248-9.

12Defoe, Review, III, nos. 5-7, 92, VII, nos. 55, 57-9, 116; Addison, Spectator, no. 3.13De I'Esprit des lois, book XIX, ch. 27.


ing public, but to acquire a stability based on continued experience of the real ifmobile goods of society. Addison's famous parable of how the vaporish virginPublic Credit is cast into the depths of despair by one set of phantoms and raisedto manic heights by another depicts only the beginnings of the process. Clearly,the lady was Danae; she needed to be fertilized by a shower of gold; but was itcontinued experience that gave the gold its value, or only fantasy in anotherform? The conversion of paper into bullion, of credit into confiance, was at best nomore than the conversion of fantasy into opinion, and it did not appear that eventhat conversion could ever be quite completed. In the world of credit finance,government was founded on opinion and reason was the servant of the passions;and though Montesquieu had depicted a society which converted credit into con-fiance by borrowing to expand its commercial and military power, even this modeof controlling and determining the future must remain dependent on the fearsand fantasies of those who must continue to invest. If Credit was like Machiavel-li's prophet in needing a sword in reserve in case the people should cease tobelieve, she needed it for the further reason that having once begun to prophesy,she could not stop. The secular future was open and indefinite, and society mustgo on advancing into it.

The frugal merchant appears at this point, as one whose willingness to investin the future was the product of his confidence in the present. In a sense he wasengaged in the process of reifying the exchange of fantasies, and thus creating anactual future; but what we earlier called presentist conservatism makes its returnwith him, because a present, no matter how solid in appearance, which consistsin a series of steps towards an imagined future, can never be purged of fantasyand passion, or endowed with any set of principles more morally stable than thelaws of the market. Bating an invisible hand — a concept whose presence even inAdam Smith can be overstated — there could be no moment in such a present atwhich human fantasies and passions were not less than perfectly self-disciplined,and the intervention of a sovereign, ultimate and uncontrollable power mightnot be called for. But the actions of sovereign and subject alike in such a scenariomust remain imperfectly rational or moral, and the Machiavellian divorce be-tween politics and morality retained its status as a decree nisi. But there was theother side of the Machiavellian formulation: if virtue was not absolute it wascorrupt, and if it was corrupt must it not degenerate further? Neither DavidHume nor Adam Smith denied that a society might be so heavily in debt to itselfas to collapse altogether.14

There were in all this the makings of a historical dialectic, an ideology of self-transformation. But it is notorious that English culture, though it may producegreat historians, does not produce philosophers of history; though there was ageneration when Scotland produced the latter in some abundance, and the need14 Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, "Of Public Credit"; Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book

V, ch. 3, "Of Public Debts."


to discover reliable laws of the market, inherent in the situation I have described,was among their motivations. But in England proper the dialectic between virtueand commerce did not reach a crisis. The Whig constitution, alleging its peculiarblend of classical balance and customary antiquity, worked too well. The Amer-ican colonies broke away, proclaiming incorrectly the irredeemable corruption ofthe mother country,15 and set up a republic of their own, on new principleswhich, as Gordon Wood has shown,16 blended a new form of dynamism with theclassical struggle to preserve virtue against change. But to Britons it seemed thateither the repression or the surrender of the colonies would be worth while if itpreserved the sovereign authority of parliament; and the writings of Josiah Tucker,perhaps the most authoritative presentation of the British theoretical response tothe American crisis, form a classic of presentist conservatism.17 They are overlaid,in our vision of the history of political thought about this time, by the fact thata few years later Edmund Burke, responding to Yorkshire radicals before he re-sponded to French revolutionaries, began a re-statement of English conservatismalong lines which display, as well as the realistic modernism of the commercialWhigs, dominant elements of the customary and traditional vision inherited fromthe seventeenth century. There were no original principles of the constitution,he declared, from which degeneration might occur or to which a return could bemade; but this was not because a new world of commerce had come to replacethat of Gothic agrarianism, but because, in a constitution whose every part waspresumed to be immemorial, no such principles could be located.18 Burke waseffecting a return from presentist to traditionalist conservatism, though it shouldbe remembered that in a properly articulated tradition, every moment is its ownpresent; and he might well have assented to the interpretation, put forward byHume before him and by Coleridge after him, of English history as an ongoingdialogue beween conservators based on the land and innovators based upon com-merce. The complexity of the institutions through which the dialogue was con-ducted helped guarantee its continuation.

A liberal interpretation of the constitution, of the relations between virtue andcommerce, and of the relations between personality, polity and economy, ensuredthat England did not develop a dialectical historicism based on the need to main-tain consciousness of a self being constantly transformed into its antithesis.19 Nor

15 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The BelknapPress, 1967); The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968); Pocock, "Virtue and Com-merce in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1972).

16 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1969).

17 See ch. 9, this volume.18 See Politics, Language and Time, ch. 7, "Burke and the Ancient Constitution: A Problem in the

History of Ideas."19See Mollyanne Marks, "Renovation of Form: Time as Hero in Blake's Major Prophecies," in Ronald

C. Rosbottom, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, vol. 5 (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1976).


did the younger Pitt's war finance produce, in the third cycle of major Frenchwars, the sort of reaction against the alliance between the military and moniedinterests which Swift had launched against Marlborough and Godolphin. In 1776— a year whose significance in the history of political thought has been celebratedelsewhere — there appeared, among other notable documents, Adam Smith's Wealthof Nations and Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, each signifying in itsown way that the interaction between the ideas of balance and corruption, virtueand commerce, which had marked what I am tempted to call the first eighteenthcentury, was beginning to be played out. In the second eighteenth century, thatof the democratic revolutions and the struggle against Napoleon, new perceptionsof institutionalized time were to be generated by political discourse, at onceless classical and - for all the convergence of Coleridgean and German thought -less dialectical. England, having done much to transform the historical self-perception of Europe, was now moving away from France and Germany alongpaths of her own, while at the same time English and American thought were todevelop along sharply divergent lines.

The mobility of property and therise of eighteenth-century

sociology

Property appears in the Western tradition of political discussion under a numberof heads, which might be summarised as follows: First and foremost, there is thetradition begun by Aristotle and continued by Aquinas, in which property ap-pears as a moral and political phenomenon, a prerequisite to the leading of a"good life," which is essentially civic. In the form of the Greek oikos, a householdproductive unit inhabited by women, minors and slaves, it provided the individ-ual with power, leisure and independence, and the opportunity to lead a life inwhich he (not until Mary Wollstonecraft do we encounter a thinker systemati-cally interested in adding "she" to this context) could become what he ought tobe. Property was both an extension and a prerequisite of personality (and weshould be aware of the possibility that different modes of property may be seenas generating or encouraging different modes of personality). The citizen pos-sessed property in order to be autonomous and autonomy was necessary for himto develop virtue or goodness as an actor within the political, social and naturalrealm or order. He did not possess it in order to engage in trade, exchange orprofit; indeed, these activities were hardly compatible with the activity of citi-zenship. Greek politics were not based on bourgeois concepts, which seems oddwhen you consider that "politics" and "bourgeois" have the same root meaningof "living in a city." The polls and the bourg, Burg or borough were profoundlydifferent places, and it is hard to estimate the amount of confusion caused by thecircumstance that the German word for "citizen" is Burger. But we are constantlyreminded not merely that Karl Marx can be considered a thinker among theclassical Western moralists, but that the Western moral tradition displays anastonishing unity and solidarity in the uneasiness and mistrust it evinces towards

From Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, edited by Anthony Parel and Thomas C. Flanagan forthe Calgary Institute for the Humanities and the Wilfred Laurier University Press, pp. 141-66. ©1978 Wilfred Laurier University Press; reprinted by permission. Some revisions to this text.

103


money as the medium of exchange. Because so many of the components of thegood life can be had for money, we are under a constant temptation to mistakemoney for the summum bonum, and an individual drawn wholly into the life ofmonetarised exchange relationships would be living in a commodified parody ofthe natural and divine order, tempted to regard himself and his wealth idola-trously. In every phase of Western tradition, there is a conception of virtue -Aristotelian, Thomist, neo-Machiavellian or Marxian — to which the spread ofexchange relations is seen as presenting a threat. In this perspective those thinkersof the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries who argued on individualist,capitalist or liberal premises that the market economy might benefit and trans-form human existence appear to be the great creative heretics and dissenters.

In the form of oikos within polls, property appears as an item within a schemeof relationships which are essentially political and obtain between citizens set freeby their property to engage in them. But there is another face of the Westerntradition of no less importance to the understanding of property: the language ofjurisprudence, inaugurated by the Roman civilians, strongly present in Aquinas,and carried on by a succession of jurists and natural-law theorists into the ageof Locke. In this tradition property, without losing any of its significance topersonality, was defined less as that which makes you what you are than as thatto which you have a right. With this interpretation we enter upon that fascinat-ing and elusive relationship between the notions of right and ownership, andupon that world of language in which "property" - that which you owned - and"propriety" - that which pertained or was proper to a person or situation - wereinterchangeable terms. The distinction between persons and things gained inprominence; and instead of being the mere prerequisite to political relations be-tween persons, property became a system of legally defined relations betweenpersons and things, or between persons through things. Since the law definedjustice in terms of suum cuique, it was possible to define the good life in terms ofproperty relations, or of human relations as the notion of property served to definethem, though the thought which stemmed from the polls constantly asked whetherthis definition of justice was adequate. The social relations which law and prop-erty defined included many which obtained between men engaged in transfer-ring, exchanging and conveying possessions and even rights; and the vision ofthe law was therefore less hostile than that of the polls towards trade, profit andaccumulation. Because jurisprudence and the jurist's conception of justice wereconcerned with men and things, they were less concerned with the immediaterelations between men as political actors or with the individual's consciousness ofhimself as living the good life. Consequently, under jurisprudence, the notion ofthe political itself changed and became less the system of relations between citi-zens and more the system of relations between authorities and subjects necessaryto a life lived under law.

Mobility of property 105

Both views, however, incorporate the notion of property in, and subject it to,a complex moral universe; and in both contexts we have learned to talk about an"ancient" view of property as opposed to a "modern" view. We associate "mod-ern" ideas of property with both capitalism and socialism, which entail those verycomplex schemes of production and exchange that we call "economics," a wordderived from the ancient oikos and oikonomike, which it supplants; and we seereason to believe that the transition from ancient to modern was bound up withthe advent of capitalism. We also incline to think that as this transition tookplace, two other things happened: the notion of unlimited acquisition escapedfrom many if not all traditional moral restraints — an escape which was itselflegitimised — and the increasingly complex and dynamic relationships and pro-cesses which we call "economics" began to surpass in importance the politicalrelations among people, swallowing up the ancient polis as they swallowed up theoikos. It is reasonable to inquire after the actual or perceived effects of this uponpersonality.

I dwell on all this because I want to establish a setting in which to pursue thenext phase of the transition from ancient to modern notions of property: theproblem posed by Professor Macpherson in his writings since he coined the notionof "possessive individualism" in 1962. He laid down the paradigm of an unre-stricted right of acquisition emerging from legal and moral constraints, whichwere those of the scholastic jurisprudence elaborated by Aquinas and Suarez. Therecent book by James Tully has explored the relation of Locke to Suarez andGrotius.1 I am going to put forward an alternative thesis, in which I shall layemphasis on the revival in the period denned of ideas about classical politics andthe view of property that went with it. I shall suggest that it was against thesecivic, rather than juristic, conceptions of property that new economic forces wererecognized and denned as asserting themselves, in such a way that capitalistproperty was recognized as historically new because it was post-classical and mod-ern, and man as proprietor and political animal was seen as existing in the his-torical dynamic that economic and moral forces created. But if one employs theparadigm of classical politics, rather than that of natural jurisprudence in inter-preting this great revolution in the concept of property — this transformation ofthe relations between polis and oikos, and between polity and economy, in thewords of Joseph Cropsey2 — one is not discounting the importance of ideas aboutproperty derived from natural jurisprudence. Tully shows us that these ideas wereoperative in the case of Locke; Duncan Forbes and others have insisted on theirimportance in the case of Hume.3 We shall have to return to them, but for the

1 James Tully, A Discourse Concerning Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1980).

2Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague,1957).

3 Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975).


present it will be contended that the story can be better understood by operatingwith the ideas of classical politics.

In England after 1649, a shattering collapse of civil authority faced theoristswith the necessity of re-conceptualising it from its foundations. In this enterpriseboth ways of thinking about property played a role. Thomas Hobbes operatedwithin the paradigm of natural jurisprudence; he showed individuals acting inand from a state of nature, extending their power over things and in so doingcoming to interact with one another, acquiring possession and right over thingsagainst one another, and even acquiring possession over rights in such a way thatthey could transfer them to a sovereign whom they instituted by the act of trans-fer.4 His individuals move from the pre-possessive to the possessive, the pre-political to the political, the pre-human to the human.

James Harrington operated within the paradigm of classical politics so com-pletely that the concepts of right and obligation make no appearance in his worksat all.5 His individuals never occupy a state of nature; they are naturally political,having been created by God in His image as capable of intelligent self-rule. Butbecause they live between heaven and earth, they occupy a dimension of secularhistory, which is partly governed by fortune. This agency redistributes property,which is to redistribute the capacity to act as fully political beings. Propertybrings power: the power of masters over servants, the power of masters overthemselves; but whenever fortune has brought about the existence of a sufficientnumber of masters, these may leave the domain of power and enter that of au-thority. Authority is not distributed by property, but by the free masters' rec-ognition of one another's political capacity; in instituting it among themselves,they enter upon the world of political relations and begin to act as the images ofGod which they are.

Property and power are the prerequisites of authority and virtue. They dis-charge no other function than that of the oikos in Aristotle and need not (thoughthey do) possess any other social or economic characteristics than those whichdistinguish masters from servants. Because they are liable to redistribution byfortune, they bring to Harrington's politics an historical dimension, and he wasable to organise history around the distributions of property; but at bottom histheory of history is simple, binary and cyclical. The oikos exists in sufficientnumbers, or it does not. In the ancient republics it existed in the form of theyeoman smallholding of the citizen warriors; then it was overcome by the feudum;now it is restored in the shape of the yeoman or gentleman freehold, and military

4See Quentin Skinner, "The Context of Hobbes's Theory of Political Obligation," in Hobbes andRousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and R. S. Peters, (New York, 1972), and "Conquest and Consent:Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy," in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement,1646-1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (Hamden, Conn., 1972).

5 See also chap. 2, this volume.


and political capacity are restored with it. One should note, however, that Har-rington's first readers early assumed what he had never said, that the breakup offeudal tenures had had something to do with trade. There was a perception ofsuch a thing, though it had small enough place in the vocabulary of classicalpolitics.

Since Harrington thought it the function of property to provide a large butlimited number of people with the basis of independence from which they couldpractise the equal relations existing among republican citizens, he found that thiscould be best performed by the relative stability of landed realty. But there wereothers (of whom, pace Macpherson, Hobbes is not necessarily the best example)who aimed to present men as acquisitive and competitive beings whose activitiesrequired regulating by a powerful and independent sovereign. Some of thesetheorists found that a commercial society best illustrated both the subject's com-petitiveness and the sovereign's independence. In their hands mobility, exchangeand acquisition furnished so many arguments for absolute monarchy; and somelatter-day criticisms of the liberal order were in this sense anticipated and ac-knowledged.

A generation later, Sir William Temple produced a carefully constructed anti-Harringtonian statement when he declared that "power," which he called "strength"and "riches," was always on the side of the governed, and nothing but what hecalled opinion (a crucial term in this story) could prevail on them to submit tothe "authority" of government.6 The next century was to be passed in elaboratingthe theme that it was in the multiple activities of commercial, cultivated andspecialised societies that opinion in Temple's sense could best develop. The com-mercial, which Marxists call the bourgeois, order was from its first appearance intheory geared to the stabilisation of authority.

But the 1670s saw the revival of Harringtonian theory. Neo-Harringtonianismsupplied an idealisation of propertied independence with which it was hoped tomobilise the country gentry in parliament against the crown's revived power ofparliamentary patronage, known as corruption. Here classical politics became forthe first time a staple of English political rhetoric; and its persistence for morethan a hundred years in the face of every discouragement and defeat suggests thatit answered some fairly profound ideological needs. From then on there were toexist two parallel and competing doctrines of propertied individualism: one whichpraised the gentleman's or yeoman's independence in land and arms as perform-ing the functions of the oikos in an English or Virginian polis, and one whichpraised the mobility of the individual in an increasingly commercial society asteaching him the need for free deference to authority.

In pursuit of the dialectic between these two modes of individualism, these6The Works of Sir William Temple (London, 1770), vol. I, pp. 29-57; "An Essay on the Origin andNature of Government," written in or after 1672.


two definitions of the political function of property, we shall not linger upon thatremarkable episode in the history of property theory associated with the names ofFilmer and Locke. If we fully analysed the debate of the 1680s, we should doubt-less learn a great deal; but in a history of property theory organised around theduality of classical and commercial politics, it is difficult to retain the image ofLocke as the hinge on which history turned. As Tully has shown, he stands inthe lineage of those thinkers who approached the politics of property through thelanguage of natural jurisprudence. He was, as far as can be told, utterly indiffer-ent (though at the same time very close) to that revival of classical politics takingplace in the neo-Harringtonian ideology of the country opposition. He carednothing for the virtue of independence threatened by corruption, and it is tempt-ing to try and place him among the philosophers of the commercial order. Butneither the refutation of Filmer in 1680 nor the justification of revolution nineor ten years later necessitated the assertion of the commercial order; it was notyet a crucial issue in English ideological debate. Within a very few years it wasto become so, and Locke was to be personally involved; but its presence is not tobe detected in his Treatises on Government, and when the great debate began it ishard to detect Locke's presence in it.

I am alluding here to what we now call the Financial Revolution of the middle1690s, which saw the foundation of the Bank of England and the successful andlasting creation of a system of public credit whereby individuals and companiescould invest money in the stability of government and expect a return varying inproportion to the success of the government's operations.7 Over the quarter-century that followed, contemporaries came to hold that this had led to thecreation of what they called a "monied interest," and that this new class of credi-tors and speculators was tending to dominate politics. This conviction led criticslike Swift8 and Bolingbroke to say what had certainly not been said before, thata new form of property had arisen, one unknown in previous history. Conse-quently the relation of property to power, studied by Harrington, and the rela-tion of property to the need for government, studied by Locke, seemed to havebeen transformed and to need reconsideration. This was a momentous intellectualevent: there had been a sudden and traumatic discovery of capital in the form ofgovernment stock and a sudden and traumatic discovery of historical transfor-mation as something brought about by the advent of public credit.

The century that followed the Financial Revolution witnessed the rise in West-ern thought (something not dissimilar may have been occurring in contemporaryJapan)9 of an ideology and a perception of history which depicted political society

7 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit,1688-1756 (London, 1970).

8Jonathan Swift, The History of the Four Last Years of the Queen, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1964),pp. 68-78.

9 See Masao Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo and PrincetonUniversity Press, 1974).


and social personality as founded upon commerce: upon the exchange of forms ofmobile property and upon modes of consciousness suited to a world of movingobjects. This eighteenth-century perception of "commercial society" was not basedin the first instance upon a perception of trade, or upon an increased hold whichmarket values were gaining upon the thought of social theorists. If we pay atten-tion to the actual records of debate, to the concerns which were expressed and thedoctrines which were developed, we find that the origins of commercial ideologylay largely in the controversy between "virtue" and "corruption" and in the as-sociated debate between "landed interests" and "monied interests" which was re-vitalised by the Financial Revolution.10 There existed an ideal of the social andpolitical personality epitomised by the term "virtue," entailing a conception ofproperty which had more to do with Harrington than with Locke and more to dowith classical than with feudal values. It extolled the image of the "patriot," theindividual rendered independent by his property and permitted an autonomousengagement in public affairs. This image was regularly opposed to that of theman of commerce and the latter had to fight its way to political recognition inthe teeth of the "patriot" ideal. Though the image of the patriot was of compar-atively recent vintage, its roots were deep in classical antiquity, and on thesegrounds it asserted a rejection of feudal values as vigorous as anything in "com-mercial" ideology.

Thus we can no longer hold that the beginnings of a modern political theoryof property are to be found in Locke's refutation of Filmer, or in any simpletransition from feudal to bourgeois values. We must think instead of an enduringconflict between two explicitly post-feudal ideals, one agrarian and the othercommercial, one ancient and the other modern. The roots of the conflict in theworld of theory and ideology lie not in the perception of two conflicting ways ofgaining wealth, so much as in that of two conflicting ways in which propertymight determine the relations of personality to government. The ideal of thepatriot or citizen entailed the image of a personality free and virtuous becauseunspecialised. The function of his property was to give him independence andautonomy as well as the leisure and liberty to engage in public affairs; but hiscapacity to bear arms in the public cause was an end of his property and the testof his virtue. As far back as Harrington, we find it stated that while in principlethe function of assuring arms and leisure can be discharged by property in goodsas well as in land, in practise merchants and craftsmen will find it harder thanwill landowners and tenants to leave their productive activities to engage in self-defence. Therefore a commercial and manufacturing society like Holland is likelyto be defended by mercenaries and governed by oligarchs. By the end of thecentury, this had been expanded into a general history of society. Medieval Eu-rope was presented in a strangely non-feudal light as a society of warrior freehold-

10J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 436-61.


ers. But with the revival of commerce and culture in the fifteenth century, thesefreeholders succumbed to the temptation to pay mercenaries to defend them whilethey pursued the profits and pleasures of civilization, and so they passed underthe rule of absolute kings, the specialists in government by whom the specialistsin warfare were paid.11 The freeholders' loss of liberty was identical with a lossof virtue.

Here for the first time we hear that there is a process of specialisation in historyand that specialisation may be incompatible with the unity of the moral person-ality which can only be found in the practice of civic virtue. It is also clearlyimplied that moral personality in this sense is possible only upon a foundation ofreal property, since the possession of land brings with it unspecialised leisure andthe opportunity of virtue, while the production and exchange of goods entailsactivities too specialised to be compatible with citizenship. The merchant andthe consumer are mistrusted as liable to pay the mercenary and the bureaucrat;yet it is seldom dogmatically stated that they constitute an inferior and banausicclass. It was not the merchant trading upon his own stock who transformed andcorrupted the relation of property to government; he might — though he wouldfind it difficult - retain his civic virtue, his autonomy and his right to keep andbear arms. The danger lay with the owner of capital, great or small, who investedit in systems of public credit and so transformed the relations between govern-ment and citizens, and by implication those between all citizens and all subjects,into relations between debtors and creditors. It was not the market, but the stockmarket, which precipitated an English awareness, about 1700, that political re-lations were on the verge of becoming capitalist relations; and this awarenesscould never have developed as it did without the unspecialised agrarian ideal ofthe patriot to serve as antithesis. The merchant became involved in the indict-ment of capitalism, and the credit society became known as the "commercial"society, because it was observed that there was a fairly obvious relation betweentrade and credit. However, an obstinate conviction survived that the individualentrepreneur ought to be free from the machinations of those who determinedthe rate at which capital might be got. There was always urban as well as agrarianopposition to the alliance of government and bank.

If this alliance - developed with varying degrees of success by Dutch, English,Scottish and French projectors - was to be successfully defended against its crit-ics, an ideological defence of specialisation, speculation and exchange would haveto be provided. Though Locke took a hand in the Recoinage of 1696, one of themajor proceedings of the Financial Revolution, he did not engage in the ideolog-ical manoeuvres which characterise the defence of credit politics. To understandthis profound shift in sociological and historical perspective, we have to turn to

11The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 427—32.


other publicists, such as Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison. Defoe argued vigor-ously that society could defend itself better against its own professional soldiersby controlling the money that paid them than by sending its citizens to serve intheir place. Out of this thesis he developed a contrast between a commercialsociety which could pay to have services performed and one without money whichcould secure them only in return for grants in land.12 The stereotype of a pre-commercial "feudal" society — or one more primitive still, like that of the Scot-tish Highlands — was in large measure the invention of defenders of the Whigsystem of government. It was harder to meet the neo-Harringtonian argumentthat a people who paid others to rule them would be exploited in both purse andliberty by their rulers. Here Defoe was on the brink of depicting a people en-grossed in their commercial and personal concerns, who maintained a constitu-tional system of government with a view to keeping their rulers in leading-stringsby retaining the power of the purse.

The conventional wisdom of today refers to this image as "liberalism" — thoughthe word was unknown in this sense during the eighteenth century — and en-courages us to think that it obtained paradigmatic dominance during the centurywhich divided John Locke from Adam Smith. The challenge of virtue to com-merce and specialisation remained constant and only half met; otherwise therewould never have been a Rousseau. The reason of most importance to our pur-poses emerges quite clearly from the record of debate. The criticism based uponthe concept of virtue presented a clear and coherent image of the unity of humanpersonality, in its relation to both society and property. Arguments like Defoe's,which clearly implied that the ideal of patriot virtue was being abandoned andtreated as historically unreal, could not be complete until an alternative image ofpersonality had been provided. It is possible to show how this was done, and thestory is in some respects familiar. Yet we cannot tell it properly if we ignore thecomplex struggle between the two images, or treat one as antique and the otheras taking its place; both were formulations of the late seventeenth century. Thereis, however, extremely strong pressure from the existing paradigms to take thetriumph of "liberalism" for granted. Both the classical and the socialist critics ofmodern society appear to need the "liberal" antithesis so badly, as a prelude tostating their own positions, that they exaggerate its paradigmatic control whilesimplifying and antedating the history of its emergence.

We have now to consider what problems necessitated the construction of a newimage of social personality and why these problems were hard to overcome. Itwas common ground that the political individual needed a material anchor in theform of property no less than he needed a rational soul. If he found that anchorin the shape of land, it guaranteed him leisure, rationality and virtue. If he

12 The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 432 -5 .


acquired land by appropriation or by inheritance, these things were guaranteedhim as part of a natural order. Locke had argued that this was not enough tonecessitate government and that a pattern of exchange relationships must figureamong its preconditions. But Locke was ever indifferent to the ideal of patriotvirtue, and it was this which the Financial Revolution seemed to challenge. Gov-ernment stock is a promise to repay at a future date; from the inception anddevelopment of the National Debt, it is known that this date will in reality neverbe reached, but the tokens of repayment are exchangeable at a market price inthe present. The price they command is determined by the present state of publicconfidence in the stability of government, and in its capacity to make repaymentin the theoretical future. Government is therefore maintained by the investor'simagination concerning a moment which will never exist in reality. The abilityof merchant and landowner to raise the loans and mortgages they need is similarlydependent upon the investor's imagination. Property — the material foun-dation of both personality and government — has ceased to be real and has becomenot merely mobile but imaginary. Specialised, acquisitive and post-civic man hasceased to be virtuous, not only in the formal sense that he has become the creatureof his own hopes and fears; he does not even live in the present, except as consti-tuted by his fantasies concerning a future. The National Debt has rendered soci-ety more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself could ever have envisaged, since it hasplaced the performance of covenants forever beyond the new Tantalus's reach andleft him to live by dreaming of it.13

When the stability of government in the present became linked to the self-perpetuation of speculation concerning a future, something happened which formsan important part of the history of ideas concerning unlimited acquisition andaccumulation. Government and politics seemed to have been placed at the mercyof passion, fantasy and appetite, and these forces were known to feed on them-selves and to be without moral limit. This is not to suggest that this was theorigin of the idea of unlimited acquisition or of the need to legitimate it; JoyceAppleby's studies of early market theory may well have shown that observationof mercantile behaviour itself generated a good deal of thought upon this ques-tion.14 But it was observance of the revolution of public credit that generated theidea that political relations were becoming relations between debtors and credi-tors — a thought which the publicists of Queen Anne's reign discussed unend-ingly — and this was seen as leading not merely to corruption, but to the despo-tism of speculative fantasy. Booms and busts, bulls and bears, became thedeterminants of politics. The value of public stock - the Dow Jones ratings ofthe eighteenth century — became the index to the stability or instability of gov-

13 See the preceding chapter.14 Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1976).


ernments, and all this was seen as placing politics at the mercy of a self-generatedhysteria (in the full sexist sense).

The intellect of the early eighteenth century can be seen applying itself to thestabilisation of this pathological condition. Defoe and others wrote about theconversion of "credit" into "opinion,"15 Montesquieu about the conversion of"credit" into "confiance."16 Defoe, a moralist, meant that men should behave insuch ways as to giwe one another good grounds for believing that promises wouldbe performed and expectations fulfilled; Montesquieu, a Machiavellian, meantthat by making themselves promises, men would discover that they had increasedtheir credit, wealth and power. Both had in mind the conversion of the purefantasies of speculation upon the future into the well-grounded opinions of con-tinued experience in an on-going and dynamic political economy. It was theproblem of how the bags of wind, which we meet in the imagery of Addison aswell as Montesquieu, might be filled, and seen to be filled, with real gold.17 (Theproblem of paper currency is acutely relevant here.) Such thinkers had recognisedthat, in the credit economy and polity, property had become not only mobile butspeculative: what one owned was promises, and not merely the functioning butthe intelligibility of society depended upon the success of a program of reifica-tion. If we were not to live solely in terms of what we imagined might happen —and so remain vulnerable to psychic crises like those of the Darien Scheme, theSouth Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Company — experience must teach us whenour hopes were likely to be fulfilled, and confiance teach us that we might createconditions in which their fulfilment would be more likely.

The conversion of passion into opinion was only one of the programs whichtheorists devised for the remedy of the situation. Albert Hirschman's The Passionsand the Interests1* suggests another, and there is a clear relation between the prob-lem of speculative politics and economics, and the existence in the eighteenthcentury of so many moral and philosophical writings on the conversion of passioninto reason and of rational egoism into socially desirable behaviour. But therewas far more at work here than a mere recognition that English society had beentaken over by hard-faced homines economici obedient only to the laws of marketbehaviour. These laws were present and there was thought about them. Therewas an anxious desire to discover what these laws were; but it is equally true, andperhaps more prominent, that it was the hysteria, not the cold rationality, ofeconomic man that dismayed the moralists. Systems of rational egoism were de-vised less to explain and legitimise what he was doing than to offer him meansof controlling his own impulses. It might be possible to distinguish between"hard" and "soft" rationalisations of this order, of which the former accepted theuncontrollable acquisitiveness of entrepreneurs who knew what they were doing,l5The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 4 4 0 - 1 , 4 5 4 - 6 . l6Esprit des Lois, XIX, 27.17 The Spectator, no. 3; Lettres Persanes, CXLII. 18Princeton University Press (1976).


and the latter hoped to teach self-discipline and self-understanding to entrepre-neurs who did not. Mandeville might be a "hard," Addison a "soft." But thereis reason to believe that the latter might preponderate; and certainly a maintheme of Hirschman's study is the emergence of a strategy whereby passion andcommerce could be presented as self-limiting forces in a new and remarkable way.

Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth-centuryindustrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classical example). Hiseighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminised, even aneffeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and withinterior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites, and symbolisedby such archetypically female goddesses of disorder as Fortune, Luxury, and mostrecently Credit herself. Pandora came before Prometheus: first, because to pursuepassions and be victimised by them was traditionally seen as a female role, or asone which subjected masculine virtu to feminine fortuna; and second, because thenew speculative image of economic man was opposed to the essentially paternaland Roman figure of the citizen patriot. Therefore, in the eighteenth-centurydebate over the new relations of polity to economy, production and exchange areregularly equated with the ascendancy of the passions and the female principle.They are given a new role in history, which is to refine the passions;but there is a danger that they may render societies effeminate - a term whoserecurrence ought not to be neglected.

A contrast in these terms between "patriot" and "man of commerce," between"virtue" and "politeness" or "refinement," emerges during the first half of theeighteenth century, with Montesquieu as not the first but an authoritative expo-nent. The patriot's virtue — his autonomy and engagement — cannot well bequestioned, so long as there exists upolis or republic in which it may be exercised;but it can be shown to have rested on an archaic and restrictive foundation. Theancient city existed in a world where neither commerce nor agriculture wereproperly developed, and for this reason, argues Montesquieu19 (Josiah Tuckerhalf a century later greatly enjoyed turning this argument against the Virgini-ans),20 the virtuous citizen was usually a slaveowner. His devotion to the laws ofhis city was characteristic of a world in which neither commerce nor culture —frequently bracketed as "the arts" — furnished social ties capable of holding mentogether and only the "stern paideia" (the phrase is Marvin Becker's) of civildiscipline could perform the task. It was a world in which there was no god butLycurgus and Plato was his prophet. With the rise of commerce and culture, newforms of social relationship emerged and virtue in the antique sense became ar-chaic. Yet Montesquieu, though he describes at length how "le doux commerce"21

19Esprit des Lois, IV, 8. 2 0 A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (1781), pp. 167-8.21 This phrase is not Montesquieu's (for its history, see Hirschman, op. cit.), but "partout ou il y a

des moeurs douces, il y a du commerce; et partout ou il y a du commerce, il y a des moeurs douces"(Esprit des Lois, XX, 1).


refines and moderates behaviour — how polis is replaced by politeness, even asoikos is absorbed by economics — does not give the name of "virtue" to that whichtakes the place of the old. Consequently, though we can glean from his text thatsomething comes after the republic whose principle is virtue, he does not explic-itly categorise what it is and does not escape from the possibility that modernrefinement corrupts antique virtue without replacing it.

Notions of refinement and politeness, then, were crucial elements in the ide-ology of eighteenth-century commerce. We have examined some epistemologicalreasons why this should have been so. If speculative man was not to be the slaveof his passions, he had to moderate these by converting them into opinion, ex-perience and interest, and into a system of social ties which these things rein-forced; and the reification followed by exchange of the objects on which his pas-sions focussed was an excellent means of socialising them. When the polite manof commercial and cultivated society looked back into his past, what he necessar-ily saw there was the passions not yet socialised, to which he gave such names as"barbarism" and "savagery"; and his debate against the patriot ideal could be farmore satisfactorily carried on if he could demonstrate that what had preceded therise of commerce and culture was not a world of virtuous citizens, but one ofbarbarism. To demonstrate that the citizens of antiquity were barbarians them-selves was plausible, but for most people too destructive. The apologists of com-merce therefore preferred, to any scheme of history based on civic humanism,those schemes of natural law and jus gentium propounded by Grotius, Pufendorf,Locke and the German jurists, which stressed the emergence of civil jurisprud-ence out of a state of nature, since the latter could be readily equated with bar-barism.22 The tradition of natural jurisprudence thus makes its reappearance inthe story — though there are scholars who would say that I ought to have beentelling it in these terms all along — joining hands with many moral philosophieswhich focussed on the notion of passion, and using the state of nature to showhow the passions were moderated in history by the progress of commerce andpoliteness.

We are contrasting a conception of property which stresses possession and civicvirtue with one which stresses exchange and the civilisation of the passions, andthereby disclosing that the debate between the two is a major key to eighteenth-century social thought. What is perhaps of greatest concern in the present contextis the spectacle of property moving from a situation in a structure of norms andrights to a situation in a process of history, of which changes in its character andfunction are seen as being largely the occasion; but we have not yet reached thepoint where the concept of property becomes absorbed into the larger scheme ofproductive relations. That point lies only a little way ahead, however, and weshall not have to distort the history of social theory in order to get there.22See Hont and Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 1983), for several

essays on this theme.


It may have been the injection into the debate of a concept of barbarism, thatsocial or pre-social condition in which there was neither ownership nor exchange- or so it was thought - which helped occasion the still imperfectly-understoodappearance in Western theory of the famous four-stages theory of human history:that men were first hunters, then shepherds, farmers, and finally merchants.23

To us, and soon to contemporaries, this meant a series of stages of production;but it is in the logic of the historical debate that it should have been primarily ascheme of the rise, diversification and control of the human passions, which thepreoccupation with property served to anchor in history. It was by this timecommon ground that the passions were aroused and satisfied (if satisfied at all) bymaterial goods and by perceptions and expectations of human behaviour impor-tantly, if not exclusively, associated with the distribution of these goods, theirreality or non-reality being an important part of the problem. The relation be-tween commercial society and its possible predecessors had done much to makethis a historical problem and to make it hinge upon the refinement of the pas-sions. The four-stages theory marked an important step in the direction of ahistoricisation of the human personality, in which the character and control ofthe passions, together with the psychologies and epistemologies associated withthe notion, were organised into a historical sequence of the modes of production.

The ninth chapter of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, in which he elaborates uponTacitus's account of the primitive Germans, is an excellent specimen from whichto illustrate what operations could be performed with the aid of this schema.24

Gibbon tells us that the German tribes were pre-agricultural and illiterate; con-sequently they lacked both money and letters, the two principal means of com-munication by which goods and information are exchanged within more civilisedsocieties. By placing exchange ahead of ownership, Gibbon indicated a historicalperspective in which agriculture, which he calls "the useful parent of the arts,"is seen rather as a necessary pre-condition of commerce than as a stage of societyexisting in its own right. He places himself in that tradition which we havetraced from Defoe rather than from Locke and in which to exchange is seen asmore important than to possess. But he does not neglect to emphasise that be-cause the Germans lacked an effective agriculture, they lacked a sense of propertywhich could reinforce and moderate the sense of self. The tribesman's passionswere violent but unfocussed; he alternated between periods of lethargy and mel-ancholy and moments of uncontrolled warrior action which roused him, saysGibbon, to "a more lively sense of his existence." For this Angst the only remedywas property. Had the German possessed land of his own to till, productivelabour would have cured his physical and psychic lethargy. The sense of honour

2 3 Rona ld L. M e e k , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambr idge Univers i ty Press, 1975) .2 4 For t he fol lowing references, see J . B . Bury 's ed i t ion of the History of the Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire {"London, 1902) , vol . 1, p p . 2 1 8 - 2 6 .


- of an exposed and vulnerable personal identity - which Gibbon tells us was allthat the tribesman understood of liberty, would have been transformed into asense of law and a capacity for military discipline by an awareness of responsibilityfor his material possessions and for the relations with others which possessioninvolved.

There are obvious enough echoes of Locke here, though Gibbon does not makethem explicit by citation. It may be added, on the one hand, that he is repeatingMachiavellian doctrine about property as the sole source of social responsibilityin the warrior as well as Machiavelli's views about mercenary and citizen militias.But on the other hand, a level of sophistication, not to be derived simply fromLocke, is to be found in Gibbon's association between property and the passions.Property as such does what "le doux commerce'' was seen to do by writers such asMontesquieu: it refines and moderates the passions by making us aware of whatwe share with others; without it there can only be a barbaric sense of honourbased upon a profound psychic insecurity. Unless the passions are focussed uponobjects outside the self, the self cannot be socialised or reconciled to its ownexistence. This is not the moment to embark upon a history of the concept ofalienation, but certainly the above is an early statement of its association withthe notion of property. If we are to be social beings, then we must become whatwe own in relation to others, what we share and exchange with others; and sincethe concept of labour has put in an appearance (though I do not ascribe to Gibbona labour theory of value) the step from exchange to production is not far away.

In the same chapter, when writing of the history of sexuality, Gibbon makesfurther use of the concept of honour - the only value which can arise from thepre-social and pre-commercial self's awareness of its identity.25 Echoing Tacituson the role of women in primitive German society, he tells us that they were aswarlike as the men and were respected as their equals. This occurred becausewarrior honour was literally the only value available at this stage of human de-velopment and was consequently adopted as one by either sex without differen-tiation. Since honour and equality are valuable, the tribal women were and areto be respected; and they added another value possessing a sexual basis: that of aferocious chastity, since "the first honour of the sex has ever been that of chas-tity." But what was the role of women as property relations developed in society?We know that it was the perceived function of property and commerce to refineand polish human passions and behaviour. At this point Gibbon joins himself toa widespread and momentous tendency in eighteenth-century thought - that ofascribing precisely the same role to women and associating their performance ofit with the rise of commercial society. It would be easy, and entirely justified, topoint out how far this association was based on the still surviving view of women

25Bury ed., I, pp. 227-8.


as a species of property, or as a medium of exchange between proprietors. How-ever, a case might be made for the view that women could expect more mobility,and even active agency, from a commercially conceived society than from thealternative model of the masculine and self-contained classical patriots.

The Enlightenment certainly saw women in the role of cultural entrepreneurs,encouraging the exchange of politeness and refinement in a variety of forms. Thenotions of commerce and culture were, as we have seen, intimately allied. But itis noteworthy that Gibbon, having remarked that the women of the Germantribes might be admirable but not very feminine, goes on to express the fear thatas property and commerce civilise society and as women play their role in thepromotion of refinement, the latter may grow less chaste. Chastity's "most dan-gerous enemy," he says, "is the softness of the mind. The refinements of lifecorrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes." Gibbon is saying aboutsexuality precisely what Montesquieu had said about commerce itself, and thereis more at work here than the standard imbalances of intersexual perception. Weare being told that something is lost with the disappearance of barbaric honourand that the process of civilisation is at the same time a process of corruption.The unity of the undifferentiated personality — whether property or sexuality beseen as the source of differentiation — may have been relegated to a savage andirrecoverable antiquity, but it has not lost its uniqueness as a value.

The associations in Gibbon's ninth chapter between property and personalityand between commerce and sexuality are not the only threads which may guideus in tracing the history of the ideology of commerce, and they are far from beingconfined to his writings alone. His contemporary William Robertson, for exam-ple, in his History of America, goes so far as to indicate (following Buffon) that thesavage - in this case the Amerindian - is sexually cold, or at least devoid ofaffection in his sexual relationships, because he is not producing and distributinga sufficient diversity of goods to permit his passions to begin growing towardssociability and civilisation.26 The point in the four-stage series (or was it really acycle?) at which the sexual and economic Arcadia might be found, Robertson (asit were) left Rousseau to determine; but in his companion work on India hedepicted an Asian society so far civilised by commerce that Europeans mighttrade with it and be neither impoverished nor corrupted.27 Given the presump-tions of the time, he would have to admit that Indians understood law but notliberty, private but not public virtue, thereby raising the question of whetherEuropean public values could have existed without the antithesis of the commer-cial principle — without barbaric and feudal honour, without classical citizenshipand virtue.

26Tbe Works of William Robertson (London, 1824), IV, pp. 297-8.27 "An Historical Disquisition concerning Ancient India," Section II; Works, IX, pp. 44-86; cf.

Gibbon, Bury ed., I, pp. 54—56.


In his View of the Progress of Society in Europe, Robertson attempted what may inthe proper sense be called a "bourgeois" interpretation of history by isolating thegrowth of trading towns as the agency which had introduced into feudal societythe principles of modern liberty.28 But the contrast with Asia was alone enoughto show that the pre-commercial component must be allowed some positive rolein the process. Gibbon touched on the same problem when he wrote, in languageonce again significantly sexual, that "the fierce giants of the north" — the savageGermans — "broke in" to a Roman world privatised to the point where person-ality had been stripped of its civic relationships. "They restored a manly spirit offreedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happyparent of taste and science."29 What happened during those ten centuries, whethersavage freedom became civic virtue, and whether freedom fertilised politeness orpoliteness freedom, Gibbon does not tell us, since the later Decline and Fall doesnot focus on the history of the medieval West; but the essays of David Hume onthe relations between liberty and the arts are enough to tell us that the problemwas a difficult one.

We have seen how property moved from being the object of ownership andright to being the subject of production and exchange, and how the effect of thison the proposition that property was the basis of social personality was to makepersonality itself explicable in terms of a material and historical process of diver-sification, refinement and perhaps ultimate decay and renewal. We have now toconsider more closely the politics of the commercial ideology, and in this regardit is crucially important to recall that the ideological necessity throughout hadbeen to provide an alternative to a view of politics as founded upon the autonomyand unity of the patriot personality. The relegation of that unity to a barbaric oreconomically primitive past, in which it must itself disintegrate and seem neverto have existed, was a powerful critical weapon in the hands of the modernists.Yet the ideal of unity obstinately refused to disappear. We find this interestinglyillustrated in the writings of Josiah Tucker, a vigorous and original conservative- he calls himself a constitutional Whig - of the era of the American Revolu-tion.30 In A Treatise Concerning Civil Government which he completed in 1781,Tucker set out to deny that political capacity could be immediately anchored inhuman personality; but he did not locate the doctrine he attacked — as his lan-guage shows he knew he might have done - in concepts of classical citizenshipor of man as by nature a political animal. He located it instead — as his choice ofa title reveals — in the political theory of Locke, whose doctrine of property hedid not explore because he believed himself confronted by English and Americandemocrats who were using Locke to divorce property from personality and make

2S Works, III, pp. 36-46; IV, pp. 52-54. 29Bury ed., I, pp. 56-58.30 He was one of those insignificant Englishmen of whom the history of political thought so largely

consists. This remark is dedicated with irritated affection to Judith N. Shklar.


the latter alone the sufficient and necessary condition of political right. If moralpersonality entailed a right of consent, and if without that consent governmentcould have no authority over the individual, then government would be foreverphilosophically as well as practically impossible, for moral rights and obligationscould not be deputed by one individual to another, whereas all government wasfounded upon the transfer of rights to representatives and rulers. Talk of "inalien-able rights" was therefore political nonsense, and if— as Tucker believed — it wasas a moral being that Locke supposed the individual to possess the right of con-sent, that premise made the latter incapable of choosing a representative to ex-ercise his rights for him: a truth which only the "honest, undissembling" — butunfortunately mad — Rousseau had been able to perceive and declare. The capac-ity to transfer rights and become the subject and beneficiary of government mustbe sought for in man not as a moral, but as a social being; and the two, declaredTucker, who was an Anglican clergyman with an acute sense of sin, were notsimply identical.31

Tucker was not a stupid man, and we should have to work hard to demonstratethat Locke was on his side and not, as he thought, against him. But when he putsforward his account of the social origins of government, he says things which theconventional wisdom of modern scholarship has encouraged us to deduce largelyfrom the supposed principles of Locke. Government, he says, originates not inthe inherent moral nature of men, but from the diversity of social activities inwhich they engage. These set up a variety of relationships among men, in whichsome individuals necessarily exert greater authority than others; in their originthese may be violent and unjust, but by experience men learn to recognise theirnecessity and conduct them properly. The various patterns of authority cohereinto what may be called a "government" or "state," which experience similarlyvests with codes of rules and systems of elaborate conventions. Though certainlyconstitutional in character, nothing prevents this government from exercising anultimately uncontrolled sovereignty. At least it is not controlled by any rights orother moral characteristics inherent in men, which need be understood as preced-ing and going into the making of government.32

Tucker was a correspondent of Hume's, and we may recognise the latter's voicein some of the things he says. But it is of greater importance to see that he wassituating himself in a by no means discontinuous tradition descending from SirWilliam Temple, who had written a hundred years before that nothing but opin-ion could prevail upon property to submit itself to authority; and what had hap-pened during the interval was that it had become increasingly possible to see howproperty might itself be the source of opinion. Tucker uses the term "naturalauthority" when describing its civil and social genesis, but he repeatedly makes51 Treatise, pp. 27, 32-3, 167-8, 236-8.^Treatise, section II, generally. Tucker relies heavily on Robertson's America.


it clear that the "natural society" which this term entails can only exist by becom-ing a commercial society. Not only is the paradigm of commerce necessary inorder to describe the diversity of activities which generate "natural authority";Tucker also emphasises that in the pre-commercial society - and here he men-tions the classical polis to which republicans appeal - the exchange of goods andservices is so underdeveloped that the normal human relationship is that betweenmaster and slave, lord and serf.33 Only as commerce develops do social relationsbecome capable of generating civil authority. Tucker uses no English equivalentfor bourgeoisie, because there is none, but he does argue at length that it was thegrowth of the borough, under the patronage of the kings and barons of medievalEngland, which permitted the conversion of the latter from barbaric into civilrulers, exercising "natural authority."34 Commerce, and the complexity of ex-change which it generates, teaches both rulers and subjects the conventions ac-cording to which government must be conducted. Being rooted in experience,these lessons take the form of opinion, and we have heard enough by now of theprocess through which it had been decided, since Temple, that the conversion ofpassion into opinion was the function of commerce.

In this projection, the personality was related to government only through aseries of social relationships of which commerce was the paradigm if not theefficient cause. Government was restrained and determined by convention butnot by natural right; and far from there being any such things as "inalienablerights," the very foundation of government lay in the alienation of rights and, ina certain sense, of personality itself. For if government is merely the aggregate ofthe diverse forms of "natural authority," there is no one social or political relationto which the personality as a whole, or in its unity, is naturally committed.

Today we call this political theory "liberalism," and though the word itselfwas not so used in the eighteenth century, the criticisms which we use it toexpress were in many cases already in circulation. The indictment to be levelledagainst such a system would be not only that it denied the individual his naturalright and his liberty of consent, but that it denied him his virtue. Commercialman might be a social but he could never be a wholly political being. There wasno moment at which he addressed himself undividedly to the public good; con-sequently he risked the privatisation which Gibbon had seen overcoming theRomans of the middle empire and which Adam Smith thought a criticism to bemost validly levelled at the conditions of life in commercial society.35 He mightunder modern conditions have the social solidarity necessary to resist the barbar-ian invaders who had brought down ancient society, but it was a good deal lesscertain that he could resist the corruption of society from within. For if all his

™ Treatise, pp. 130-2, 167-8 , 170-201. 34Treatise, section III.35 "Of the Influence of Commerce on Manners," Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, Part II,

Division 2, section 3.


political relationships were mediated, he must in the last analysis be governed byintermediaries, whether these took the form of mercenaries, courtiers, clergy orrepresentatives; and every theory of corruption, without exception, is a theory ofhow intermediaries substitute their own good and profit for that of their supposedprincipals. The theory of surplus value itself may be considered an extension ofcorruption theory from the political to the economic realm. Virtue — a synonymfor autonomy in action — was not merely a moral abstraction, but was declaredto be a human necessity.

To all this the apologists of commerce replied that the unity of personality inpolitical action was imaginable only under conditions so archaic and remote thatit could not currently exist and, if we looked closely, would appear not to haveexisted even then. They added that the growth and diversification of humanpotentialities through the development in history of the capacity to produce anddistribute was the true story of the human personality in society and that any lossof virtue which specialisation entailed was a price well paid for the increase ineconomic, cultural and psychic capacity. But the fact that the apologists so reg-ularly admitted the possibility of a loss of virtue is a proof that the ideal of theundifferentiated personality, even when driven from history, refused to disappearas a norm. Montesquieu had called it "le plainte de Platon" that "le commercecorrompt les moeurs pures,"36 and we may call it "le plainte de Rousseau" that"les moeurs pures" had never been fully realised in a history conceived as a processof commerce and specialisation. There were innumerable treatments of the ten-sion between virtue and commerce, and innumerable attempts to resolve it, someof which satisfied their authors and may satisfy the modern critic; but there is nogreater and no commoner mistake in the history of social thought than to supposethat the tension ever disappeared, that the ideals of virtue and unity of personalitywere driven from the field, or that a commercial, "liberal" or "bourgeois" ideol-ogy reigned undisturbed until challenged by the harbingers of Marx.

We have been tracing, from the era of Hobbes and Harrington to that of Humeand Rousseau, a complex dialectic based first, on the perception that there werenow two ways — an ancient and a modern, a classical and a commercial — inwhich property might be seen as the foundation and determinant of social andpolitical personality, and second, on an increasing awareness that the latter wayfurnished the human creature with a history, the former with a means of protest-ing against it. Real and mobile property formed the substratum of a quarrelwhich ended as that between the unity of personality and its increasing diversi-fication in history, and it is hard not to link the problems perceived by Rousseau

36Esprit des Lois, XX, 1: "On peut dire que des lois du commerce perfectionnent les moeurs, par lameme raison que ces memes lois perdent les moeurs. Le commerce corrompt les moeurs pures:c'etait le sujet des plaintes de Platon: il polit et adoucit les moeurs barbares, comme nous le voyonstous les jours."


and Smith with Marx's indictment of specialisation and diversification, though Ishall not attempt to consider how this link might be established. The problemof personality persisted as the core of the matter. But by the time of Marx thereexisted the powerful paradigm of the classical economics, of which Adam Smithwas said to be the father and Locke the somewhat shadowy ancestor.

There is an enterprise, to which Joyce Appleby is the most recent contributor,of providing Smith with a pedigree of earlier analysts of market behaviour; butshe does not seem to have shown how the analysis of the market could become aproblem in political theory, and her dismissal in a footnote of anti-commercialideologists as diverse as the Diggers studied by Christopher Hill and the countryideologists studied by myself as "reactionary" (and so presumably not worth thinkingabout) appears to hinder her from doing so.37 I suggest that we cannot under-stand the vindication of commercial society unless we understand the grounds onwhich it was assailed and acknowledge the attack's continuous vitality. This obligesus to take a route which leads through Mandeville and Hume to Ferguson andSmith, and to encounter classical economics at the end of it, after long debatebetween virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion. In arecent work by Donald Winch,38 Smith is interpreted in this light, and we arereminded that he was a professor of moral philosophy and his first major workwas a study of the theory of moral sentiments.

But if classical economics emerged in this way, if the last of the civic human-ists was the first of the Scottish economists, if the quarrel of the ancients andmoderns furnished the context in which the developing understanding of marketrelations took on problematic meaning, then the classical economics seem rapidlyto have hardened into a paradigm which operated to deny the ambivalent his-toricism of late Whig culture. Bentham and the elder Mill, as well as McCullochand Ricardo, would seem to have much to do with this, and we are left trying tosee how their thought emerged in history. The space from Smith to Ricardo isreplete with problems and possibilities.

37 App leby , Economic Thought, p . 2 6 8 , n . 6 1 .38 Donald W i n c h , Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge University

Press, 1978).

7

Hume and the AmericanRevolution:

The dying thoughts of a North Briton

This essay begins by exploring the second part of its title and then enlarges uponsome wider implications of the first. That is to say, I want in the first instance toconsider Hume's perception of the crises in English and American politics thatmarked the last decade and a half of his life and were at a crescendo when hedied; and I want to consider what doing so may tell us about his perception ofthe historical world he was about to leave. I have emphasized the words "English"and "American" in order to hint, by exclusion, at something already implied bythe title: that Hume's view of the British world in disruption was very much aview from Edinburgh; and my concern will be with Hume as publicist, historian,and political theorist, prior to Hume as philosopher. From Hume's perception ofthe American Revolution, I shall turn in conclusion to say something about hisrole in the ideological history of that great event, one as replete with paradox aseven Duncan Forbes1 could desire.

The thrust of this paper is historicist, in the sense that it emphasizes Hume'sconsciousness of history and of the moment in history that his individual life hadoccupied and was about to leave. Neither his historiography nor his philosophyis historicist in any of the principal senses that word was later created to express.But Hume was a historian as well as a philosopher and, in the former role as wellas the latter, one of the greatest of his century. Edward Gibbon, who thoughtTacitus the greatest historian of all time, once called Hume "le Tacite de l'E-cosse,"2 and he did not mean the compliment to be an empty one. Discussionsof Hume are predominantly discussions of his philosophy in the strict sense.

From McGill Hume Studies, edited by David Fate Norton, Nicholas Capaldi, and Wade L. Robison,pp. 325-43. © 1979 Austin Hills Press; reprinted by permission.

1 Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).2 The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols. (London: Cassell, 1956), 2:107.

125


which may perhaps appear as much a contemporary as a historical phenomenon.But it seems desirable to draw attention to Hume as a historian, as a historicalfigure, and as a figure in history as he himself perceived it. The second relatedpoint that needs to be made is that, as well as a philosopher, Hume was diphilosophe,a leader in the great eighteenth-century secularization of the intelligible universe,when secular man, ceasing to be the subject of a miraculous redemption, becameinstead an actor in civil history. The earthly city with its ideals of political virtueand cultivated taste replaced the heavenly; and the political city, or common-wealth, together with the opportunity for virtue it afforded, had since the Flor-entine Renaissance been seen as involved in increasingly complex historical con-tingencies. These - the processes that built up or broke down commonwealths -had come, from about a century before Hume's lifetime, to be discerned moreand more in terms of political economy, or of the interactions between polity andeconomy. Like his bicentennial peers Gibbon, Smith, and Jefferson, Hume wasdeeply involved in patterns of thought that had descended from Machiavelli,Harrington, and Montesquieu. He both employed and criticized these as historian,essayist, moralist, and commentator on his own times; and in so employing them,he took part in their profound and important modification. We therefore have aHume who was an analyst of his own moment in history and in the same act amaker and changer of intellectual history. It is this historical Hume I mean todiscuss. The aim will be to consider his handling of the historical and politicalvocabularies of his age, without making very much attempt to connect this withhis analyses of natural and moral philosophy.

A superficial reader of Mossner's still unsurpassed Life might gain the impres-sion that, following the disastrous imbroglio with Rousseau and his final stint asan amateur diplomat, Hume retired to Edinburgh in the late 1760s and did littlemore than potter amiably about the New Town until the onset of his fatal illness.Hume's letters, however, leave a different impression; there is much about themin these concluding years that is not particularly cozy. Hume wrote many lettersto his London publisher, William Strahan, that are outstandingly though notabnormally cantankerous in their kind,3 though he was always distressed whenhe discovered he had distressed his correspondent. Poor Strahan indeed lived tobe denounced by David Hume as an English Whig, and by Benjamin Franklinas a British Tory, a fate perhaps unduly severe even for a London Scot withambitions in eighteenth-century politics. Hume, for instance, affected to holdStrahan blameable for the City of London's 1770 petition for a dissolution ofParliament and the removal of evil ministers.4 This letter comes close to one

3 For letters in this tone on business as opposed to political matters, see The Letters of David Hume,ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:212, 218f., 223f., 225, 227f.,236, 277f., 279f., 359-61 (hereafter cited as Utters).

4Ibid.,pp. 217-18.

Hume and the American Revolution 127

addressed to Gilbert Elliot, in which Hume declares from Edinburgh: "Our Gov-ernment has become a Chimera; and is too perfect in point of Liberty, for so vilea Beast as an Englishman, who is a Man, a bad Animal too, corrupted by above aCentury of Licentiousness. The Misfortune is, that this Liberty can scarcely beretrench'd without Danger of being entirely lost . . . I may wish that the Catas-trophe shou'd rather fall on our Posterity; but it hastens on with such largeStrides, as leaves little Room for this hope."5 There is little reason to think thatthe philosopher's feelings were more moderate in the last months of his life.

Hume tells Elliot that he is revising the text of his History, with sentimentslike the above in mind, and is bent upon purging it of the last taint of Whigprejudices. He is blowing off steam, no doubt, but there is too much of this kindof thing to be neglected. The vigor with which he denounced the excesses ofliberty have led some readers to suppose that he swung to a reactionary and evena Tory political attitude in his last years, though Giuseppe Giarrizzo's attemptto relate this to changes in his philosophy has been vigorously opposed by DuncanForbes.6 I shall not try to consider whether Hume's philosophy, in the technicaland academic sense, can be said to have changed in ways that can be politicallyexplained, but it will further my theme if I offer some consideration of why boththe word "reactionary" and the word "Tory" fail to do justice to the ambivalenceof contemporary political thought in general, and of Hume's political thought inwhich it is many times redoubled. Giarrizzo's study was an admirable contribu-tion to the study of this ambivalence, which Forbes has carried into further de-grees of elaboration.

Ambivalence indeed is our keynote; we have to understand how it was that thefierce enemy of popular liberty also wrote, "I am an American in my Principles,and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves as theythink proper," adding in the same letter that "to punish those insolent Rascalsin London and Middlesex" was a far worthier object of government in October1775.7 The entirely typical letter of 1770, from which I first quoted, can helpus reach this goal if we analyze two of its components: first, its Anglophobia,which in Hume's case is never to be forgotten; second, the thinking it reveals onthe relations of authority and liberty, which the English constitution had carriedto greater heights of fruitful complexity than had been attained elsewhere. IfHume thought the English a bad lot, he considered their constitution a marvel-lous creation in its way — ambivalence again, which can be explained in terms ofnational identity.

Hume may be termed a North Briton, a term signifying a Scotsman who in

5Ibid. , p. 216.6Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Hume politico e storico (Turin: Einaudi, 1962); review by Forbes, The HistoricalJournal 6 (1963):280-95.

1 Letters, 2:303.


the eighteenth century believed that the Union of 1707 had established either acommon nationality or an equality between two nationalities. But the insecurityof referring to Scotland as North Britain is underlined when we consider theunsuccessful experiment (which was also made) of referring to England as SouthBritain. Eighteenth-century Scotsmen had no reason to believe that they had beenadmitted to an equal partnership, nor did the English attempt to persuade themthat they had. Not the least revealing fact uncovered by Mossner is the circum-stance that Hume all his life conversed in broad Scots and yet gave anxious careto the complete Anglicization of his and his friends' written and spoken lan-guage. He advised William Robertson on the elimination of Scotticisms fromthe latter's histories; and he was active in the importation of an Irish elocutionistto Edinburgh to teach a perfectly English manner of speech,8 the reason being thatany trace of a Scots accent was considered a bar to professional or political ad-vancement in London, supposed to be the British capital. Hume's generation, inshort, confronted a problem in bilingualism, but once it was considered a matterof the relation between the metropolitan and a provincial version of the sameculture, the Scots had no alternative to outplaying the English at their owngames. That is what lies behind Hume's pronouncement that this was the histor-ical age and this the historical nation.9 There was no political nationalism inScotland because no Scot had any belief in his country's ancient constitution orany desire to hear the auld sang sung again. But from David Hume to JohnMillar, the Scottish historical intellect developed enormously, in part as a con-sequence of the attempt to understand the English constitution better than theEnglish did themselves. It was the abrasive Hume who wrote a History of England,the far smoother Robertson who wrote a History of Scotland, and there is no ques-tion to which of the two the English paid attention.

A North Briton, then, was a Scotsman committed to a restatement of Englishculture in such terms that it would become British and that Scotsmen wouldmake their own way in it. The vehement Anglophobia that Hume at times al-lowed himself to express may be attributed to insuperable doubts about whetherthis enterprise was succeeding. The place of men of letters in eighteenth-centurysociety was always of profound concern to him: as a young adult he diagnosed hisown psychosomatic disorder as entirely occasioned by this problem,10 and as aclassical humanist of his age he saw it as very largely a question of political order.It is desirable to stress how many of the Essays Moral, Political and Literary areessays about the politics of culture. This concern persisted to the end of his life,as when in March 1776 he wrote to congratulate Gibbon on the first volume ofthe Decline and Fall and expressed surprise that it was possible for an Englishman

8 E. C. Mossner, The Life of'David Hume (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1954), pp. 3 7 0 -75.

^Letters, 2:230. 10Mossner, pp. 66-88.


to write history in a society given over to faction for more than a generation.11

Perhaps we should not make too much of Hume's disappointment, some thirty-five years before, over the failure of his Treatise to attract public attention; butwhen in 1741—42 he set about reestablishing his reputation with the Essays, headdressed himself to the great paper war among Walpole, Bolingbroke, and thewits of England, kept alive as an issue by Walpole's recent fall from power. Hewarned both parties against factionalism, in language showing that his sympa-thies were already leaning toward Walpole's side of the constitutional issue. Butthe 1742 volume contained a "Character of Sir Robert Walpole," in which wefind the judgment that under this minister "trade has flourished, liberty de-clined, and learning gone to ruin."12 Hume suppressed this verdict in later years,but in 1742 it clearly if mildly echoed the hatred that Pope, Gay, and Swift hadfelt for Walpole as for one whose corruption of politics was destroying the arts.Hume's judgment of Walpole is ambivalent, and the Essays are in large part areconsideration of the relations of the three elements he had named: trade, liberty,and learning. Here is as good a point as any at which to begin our journey overthat "terrible campaign country" that Forbes has described Hume as presentingto the reader,13 in the hope of arriving at some understanding of that hatred ofEnglish faction so evident in the letters of Hume's last years.

The political ideology - Commonwealth and Country, Old Whig and Tory inrestless but stable combination - which had united Bolingbroke and the Englishpoets in the denunciation of Walpole,l4 supposed that the constitution was foundedupon a principle of balance between independent parts. To abandon balance orto compromise independence was to corrupt both constitution and virtue, sincethe political balance offered the only conditions under which the individual couldflourish as a moral and civic being. To think of the poet, scholar, or man ofletters as engaged in the practice of public virtue was to affirm that he, too, wascorrupted and frustrated by the rule of a corrupt minister; hence the great polem-ics of the so-called Tory satirists. Walpole was supposed to be wielding two greatinstruments of corruption, of which the first was parliamentary patronage andthe second public credit. The latter, which produced rule by a class of investorsinterdependent with the executive, had much to do with the expansion of trade,

"Letters, 2 :309-11 .12For the bibliographical history of this passage see Mossner, pp. 142-44. See also Bertrand A.

Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln, Nebr.:University of Nebraska Press, 1976).

13Hume's Philosophical Politics, p. viii.14 Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirementand Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969);Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1959); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1975).


though the two were logically separable. The Commonwealth ideology, whichappealed to urban and suburban Old Whigs, was also a Country ideology withappeal to Tory gentry, because the ideal of independence within balance sug-gested that ultimately the civic individual should be a proprietor of land — realproperty conferring independence, mobile property tending to corruption anddependence. But at this point there arose a contradiction within the politics ofculture. The financial politics of Walpole might be said to corrupt the arts: butwere not the arts themselves a source of corruption? It was widely held that atthe end of the agrarian Middle Ages the revival of trade and the revival of learninghad tempted the warrior freeholders to pay others to defend and govern them,sacrificing liberty and virtue the better to enjoy commerce and culture. The artsmight therefore be the cause of their own decline, and trade, liberty, and learningmight be at odds rather than in harmony.

Scots were less liable than Englishmen to the temptations of agrarian primitiv-ism. It was all too easy to remind them that if they wanted to know what asociety of warrior peasants was really like, they had only to look north of theHighland Line, and that the journey to Darien or Hudson Bay was well worthmaking in order to overcome such barbarism. The Scotland of 1707-45, in whichHume grew up and began to write, was one deeply committed to the pursuit oftrade and taste, commerce and culture; and Hume's own commitment to the lifeof a man of letters must hold him back from any kind of primitivist romanticism.This was why he was never happy with his friend Adam Ferguson's Essay on theHistory of Civil Society,15 and why his emotions discharged themselves on theevident fraud of Macpherson's Ossian with something like relief.16 And yet, hisdeep fascination with the personality of Rousseau shows that he was anything butinsensitive to the underlying dualities of his age; on the contrary, he was likeevery other philosopher of the time seeking to work them out in his own terms.He could not join with the Bolingbroke circle in the desperation of their assaultson Walpole and preferred to suggest that both parties were overstressing theimportance of a single minister's impact on the health of the constitution.17 Tosay this was to undermine the ideology of virtue and corruption at its source, andif it was Tory to assail Walpole and Whig to affect a pose of moderation, thenHume's argument at this point is Whig in a somewhat Addisonian sense. But hecould not deny that Walpole had been the enemy of letters; for it was an evidentfact that English letters at their most polite — and Hume held that the first authorof polite English prose had been Swift18 — considered Walpole their enemy. To

15Utters, 1:304, 308; 2:120, 125-26, 131-32, 133, 136. 16Ibid., 2:310-11.17 See the latter part of Hume's essay "That politics may be reduced to a Science," in The Philosophical

Works, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4 vols. (London, 1886), 3:98-108 (hereafter cited asWorks).

18"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:159 and note.


grasp the next stage in the analysis of paradox, it is necessary to understand thatthe ideology of the anti-Walpolean polemic was quite as much republican as itwas Tory. Bolingbroke's nominally Tory circle had embraced the ideology ofconstitutional balance to the point of representing the principles of English gov-ernment as those of a commonwealth based on a landed interest. To defend mon-archy in the teeth of such an assault was to defend the commercial oligarchy ofthe Hanoverian Whigs, of which the Anglo-Scottish Union was one of the props.

We may consequently abridge19 the Hume of the Essays as, first, adopting theposition — from which he was never altogether to retreat — that a virtuous andfrugal republic is in theory the ideal form of human government; and second, asarguing that it is under republican government that commerce and culture ini-tially flourish. Because republics are ruled by public law, property and expressionare guaranteed their safety, and prosperity and politeness can develop. The foun-dations of the republic are therefore not in agrarian austerity, and we find in theEssays the beginnings of the suggestion, to be carried further by Montesquieu,that where ancient republics were violent and harsh in their politics or theirmanners, it was precisely because commerce and politeness were lacking. It istherefore not certain that the growth of civilization necessitates the continuanceof the ancient republican form; there are ways in which polite letters and mannerscan be seen to develop best under monarchy, and it is possible for monarchies tolearn from republics the discipline of public law.20 Hume can be seen at thispoint sharing with Montesquieu and Gibbon the widespread eighteenth-centuryconviction that Bourbon France is the most friendly, gracious, and polite to menof letters of all societies the world has seen.21 In republican and partly republicansocieties, on the other hand - and England is one of these - liberty and equalitybeget a necessary ungraciousness,22 a social style unfriendly to the man of letters(especially, we may surmise, if he is a provincial or a foreigner). It may be ob-served, first, that virtue is still political and has found no other supportive envi-ronment than the free republic; second, that the gap between liberty on the onehand and culture on the other has in no sense been bridged. It seems of impor-tance to the interpretation of Hume to put forward the suggestion that it neverwas to be.

Hume was no ideologue and could not for obvious reasons carry out the sche-matic logic of suggesting that Walpole's commercial society was more friendlyto politeness than were its adversaries. But he did not join with the poetic coun-terculture of Pope and Gay (one wonders if he knew how bitterly its membersdespise Scotsmen who were not as Anglicized as Arbuthnot). By the end of his

19"Of Civil Liberty," "Of Eloquence," and "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences"contain most of what is summarized here.

20"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:157-59; "Arts and Sciences," Works, 3:176-81, 184-87.21 "Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:159. 22"Arts and Sciences," Works 3:187-88.


life he was to decide that both government and opposition in England werealtogether incapable of politeness in any form, but one suspects that this was adiscovery of the 1760s. Meanwhile, the Essays contain two important adjust-ments to the anti-Walpolean polemic: Hume accepts one and rejects the other ofthe great devices of corruption attributed to Walpole, but he does both in amanner that implies rejection of the pure country-commonwealth tradition. Heaccepts the premise that government in a society such as that of eighteenth-century England requires a plentiful supply of parliamentary patronage, in theform of offices the executive may distribute to aspiring politicians.23 This was toreject the opposition thesis that government must be a pure balance, and toconcede that the executive must have a dominant role; and it was to reject therepublican ideal that government must rest on a foundation of virtue, and toconcede that passion and interest must be recognized and even harnessed. Butthe ideal is rejected only as incapable of realization, not as an ideal in itself, forHume is conceding that a measure of corruption is necessary and beneficial in aworld of commerce - and we already know that commerce is a prerequisite to thedevelopment of culture. Virtue and politeness therefore remain nonidentical, andthe latter has taken an important step away from the republican matrix in whichit developed.

The second great device of Walpolean government was supposed to be publiccredit, which brought the executive and its creditors into dependence one uponanother. Here Hume is unqualified in his condemnation, though he characteris-tically remarks that it is republics rather than monarchies that tend to contractincreasing public debts: a despot can declare himself bankrupt with impunity,but in commonwealths, where the public authority rests upon the public faith,the machinery of public credit becomes irreversible.24 Hume never receded fromthis position. Duncan Forbes, who sometimes yields to the temptation to torpedoa conclusion before we know exactly what it might have been, emphasizes thecircumstance that Hume invested in the public funds and wrote a letter aboutselling part of his holdings at a profit.25 But the philosopher's awareness of thegulf between ideal and practice is surely enough to make it clear that he knewwhat he meant when he wrote such sentences as "Either the nation must destroypublic credit, or public credit will destroy the nation."26 Hume was on friendlyterms with Isaac de Pinto, the only political economist of the age to argue thatnational debt was a thoroughly healthy phenomenon,27 but he retained a vivid

23 "Of the First Principles of Government," Works, 3:112-13; "Of the Independency of Parliament,"Works, 3:120—21; "Whether the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to aRepublic," Works, 3:123-26.

24"Of Civil Liberty," Works, 3:162-63. 25Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 126-27.26This sentence was added in 1764 to "Of Public Credit" (Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp.

174-75; Works, 3:370).27See Richard H. Popkin, "Hume and de Pinto," Texas Studies in Literature 12 (1970) 417-30; idem,

"Hume and Isaac de Pinto: Five Unpublished Letters," in William B. Todd, ed., Hume and the


image of a society destroying itself by heaping up the public indebtedness to thepoint where trade and agriculture were both brought to ruin. We shall see thatthis was an important feature of contemporary interpretations of the AmericanRevolution.

But if virtue and culture are ultimately unreconciled, and if the commerce therepublic begets leads to a condition of public debt that destroys both liberty andprosperity, we are left with an account of the forces at work in history that isbased upon a fundamental and acknowledged contradiction. The civilized mon-archy Hume has begun to show signs of preferring is no more than a temporarycompromise with these warring forces. To summarize the contradiction in a sin-gle sentence is to express it in more dramatic and dialectical a form than wascongenial to the mind of Hume, yet his essay "Whether the British Governmentinclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Republic" clearly indicates that itmust incline one way or another, and must end sooner or later in an easy deathor a violent one.28 Hume's temperament, his politics, and his philosophy weresuch that he chose to express the historicist contradiction of his age in terms notof the dramatic juxtaposition of opposites but of the inexhaustibly subtle ambiv-alence that provides Forbes with his "terrible campaign country." There is nostatement that does not contain its own ambiguity or is not offset by anotherstatement somewhere else. But there is Hume's fascination with the personalityof Rousseau, inviting the explanation that he recognized him as one who sensedas many and as complex contradictions as he did and who dramatized every oneof them in his own personality. Rousseau was the undramatic Hume's antiself;the tragic farce of the encounter arose from the circumstance that Rousseau wasby this time so paranoid that he was antiself to everybody he met. If we followForbes through the debatable marches and borderlands of the Hume country, itis to study one who converted his awareness of the ambivalent forces at work inhistory and personality into polite letters, skeptical philosophy, and magisterialhistory. We may try to pursue some of these themes down to Hume's farewell toexistence in 1776.

A historicist explanation of Hume's philosophy - that is, one that related itto his historical awareness - would be a bold attempt if pursued in detail andwould certainly encounter far more phenomena than it could hope to explain.But if we see him as one aware, like so many others in his age, that virtue mustgive way, for good and ill, to the commerce and refinement it generates in thecourse of history, we can add that trade and letters were perceived by the age asresting upon imagination and the passions, and as necessitating forms of govern-ment unlike those that rested upon republican austerity. A Marxist explanationof Hume would certainly stress that the eighteenth century was caught between

Enlightenment: Essays Presented to Ernest Campbell Mossner (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press;Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1974).

28 Works, 3:125-26. The same antithesis occurs in "Of Public Credit," Works, 3:372-74.


an intensely realistic conception of the rationality of real property and an equallyintense awareness of the mobile character of the property that was coming toreplace it (and eighteenth-century thinking is sufficiently proto-Marxist to con-vince non-Marxists such as myself that it often invented Marxist explanations ofitself). In this sense there is a relationship between the shift from real to mobileproperty and Hume's thought on the connection between reason and the pas-

29

sions.In Hume's social history of ideas the independence and self-knowledge of the

virtuous citizen helped bring into being a commerce and culture bound to trans-form his nature because they rested upon passion and imagination rather than onreason. An empire of reason had raised up one of passion to succeed it. But itfollowed that reason was incomplete without the passion it partly generated,especially once it was decided that the virtuous citizen was less rational, becauseless polite, than the inhabitant of a commercial society. History would here rein-force any epistemology that might otherwise suggest that reason required theimagination to feed on, but a history that started from the ancient citizen wouldretain the precommercial republic as a paradigm of virtue. The world of imagi-nation would continue to require the discipline of classical criticism; the civilizedmonarchy — the form of government best suited to a polished and commercialnation - would continue to require the discipline of republican freedom. But ifthis suggested that liberty was linked with freedom and government with thepassions, it would be equally convincing to equate liberty with the empire of thepassions, government with the insecure supremacy of reason. Hume held thatauthority and liberty could never be reconciled and that neither could replace theother.30 Following Sir William Temple, he reworded Harrington to suggest thatproperty and force were on the side of the governed and that it was opinion andinterest that operated in favor of the government,31 and he held a very similarview of the unstable relations of reason and passion. His historicism was thereforein a double relationship with his skepticism: he held that reason always gave wayto passion and therefore had never really preceded it; but his image of the rolethat reason might enjoy was classical as well as modern.

Consequently, Hume saw history as the work of passional forces converted intorationality by a variety of agencies of which government was the chief. Commerceand culture were important but could not do its work for it and contained theirown tendencies toward unreason. The Commonwealth and Country ideology, towhich Hume was attracted, but which he could never accept, professed an eigh-teenth-century version of Ancient Constitution thinking, according to which theprinciples of balance were original to a constitutional system that must be pre-29Cf. The Machiavellian Moment, chaps. 1 3 - 1 4 .30 "Of the Origin of Government," Works, 3:116.31 "Of the First Principles of Government," Works, 3 : 1 0 9 - 1 2 .


vented from moving away from them. But Hume had no belief in original ratio-nality; he saw governmental forms as disciplining the original dynamism of pas-sion, whose primacy was so complete that only experience and custom, ratherthan rational prudence or legislative wisdom, could bring government into beingand maintain it. He therefore preferred to see government as modern and to lookback in time toward periods when it had been less coherent than it was now.This modernism, however, did not originate with Hume or with his philosophy.It had been the position of Walpole's apologists about 1730, and half a centuryearlier of the High Tory historians around Robert Brady, who had defended themonarchy of the 1680s by arguing that feudal history made it impossible thatthere should ever have been an Ancient Constitution. Writers of the eighteenthcentury, both English and American, did not fail to notice the curious way inwhich Tory arguments in one age had become Court Whig arguments in another,and Hume's cautious sympathy for the Walpolean position laid him open to thecharge of being a seventeenth-century Tory at a time when eighteenth-centuryTories were using Commonwealth arguments. He was not without sympathy forthe latter position, for it contained elements no eighteenth-century mind couldaltogether reject. But it may be true — at least we have his word for it — that ashe grew older he eliminated from his History more and more elements he hadcome to regard as Whig, at a time when he considered English Whiggism in-creasingly factious.32 The ambiguity of the word "Tory" in England, however,coupled with its relative inapplicability in Scotland, should warn us against con-sidering that Hume became a Tory in any eighteenth-century sense as his inter-pretation of the past became more Tory in a seventeenth-century one.

The changes in the History of England, it has been thought, tend to shift theemphasis from the view that the pre-Civil War constitution was ambiguous andincoherent toward the view that, given its ambiguity and incoherence, the casefor the prerogatives of the crown was much stronger than Whig historiographywould admit. Hume saw political history as a tug-of-war between authority andliberty, and it appears as if his sympathy for the element of authority increasedas his disgust with faction - which is the excess of liberty - grew. The opinionthat the English constitution allows too much to liberty, which we find in theletters about 1770, is echoed nearly thirty years before, in such essays as "Whe-ther the British Government inclines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to a Re-public." We read here that the balance between authority and liberty is inher-ently unstable - as philosophically it must be. Property and the passion forliberty are all on one side, and the government has only its command of patronageand the power to corrupt leaders of opposition with which to counter the im-pulses of the governed. However, patronage is on the way to becoming so dom-

32"My Own Life," Works, 3:5.


inant a species of property that an absolute monarchy having the whole kingdomin its grip is perhaps the likeliest outcome, and very arguably we should preferthis "easiest death" or "euthanasia" to the violent death of faction and republi-canism. This essay, however, could easily be read as a pessimistic version of aCountry tract; and when we find it claimed in Tom Paine's Common Seme that theKing of Great Britain exercises despotic authority because he has come to mo-nopolize parliamentary patronage,33 we must recognize that Paine is saying (con-sciously or otherwise) that Hume's prophecy has been already if violently ful-filled. By the year of his own decease, on the other hand, Hume saw Britishgovernment as threatened by the violent death of faction if not by that of bank-ruptcy as well. To understand his attitude to the American crisis we must con-sider how this came about.

Hume saw liberty and authority as in unstable relation, and liberty as alwaysliable to break down in faction, because he saw both philosophy and history asnecessarily — he was no pessimist — the partial discipline of passion by reason.He thought in this way because he was a historian of enlightenment as well as ofcivil society; and the philosophe historian had to explain the persistence of religion,just as the historian of taste had to explain the persistence of the barbaric. Toaccount for the persistence of irrational elements in culture and politics he had toresort to the combination of passion with habit. The undisciplined imaginationgenerated absurd ideas in the mind; the personality then folded itself aroundthem; and the undisciplined sociability of mankind led to the rise of combativesects, in taste and philosophy34 as well as in religion and politics,35 that pittedone irrationally retained habit of mind against another. Hume knew far too muchabout the role of imagination in creating liberty, commerce, culture, and knowl-edge itself to take a merely negative and repressive view of the need for rationaland political discipline. The great originality of his history of the Puritan Revo-lution is his insistence that the fanaticism of the Puritan sects was both an exces-sive threat to rational freedom and a necessary step toward its establishment. Butlike other observers of the first three decades of George Ill's reign, Hume wastroubled by the revival of quasi-revolutionary slogans in the confused politics ofthe time. Here we may link him directly with the tradition of Bolingbroke; forhe concurred with that analyst36 in thinking of parties and factions as irrationalsurvivals of seventeenth-century principles in an age when they had lost theirmeaning, and also in thinking that the equilibrium of eighteenth-century societywas threatened by corruption from above as by faction from below, so much sothat it might have to choose the manner of its death. But where Country andCommonwealth thinkers united in considering corruption the enemy, it is part

33Common Sense, chap. 1. 34 "Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature," Works, 3 :150-51.3 5"Of Parties in General," Works, 3 :129-33. 36See Bolingbroke's Dissertation upon Parties, passim.


of Hume's skeptical Whiggism (rather than his conservatism) that he saw factionas the principal danger.

It is safe to suppose that part of Hume's detestation of the London radicals, inwhom he saw English liberty as mere licentiousness, originated from the savageanti-Scotticism of Wilkes and Churchill and of Number 45 of The North Briton.Hume had always been careful not to carry his History into the era between 1688and his own time, or to give his analysis of recent and contemporary Britishpolitics. But his acquaintance Tobias Smollett, the London Scot, had not hesi-tated to publish an avowed continuation of Hume's History,37 in which he ana-lyzed post-Revolution Britain in terms more Tory and Country than Hume wouldhave permitted himself. This had left him in the role of professional apologist forLord Bute and the young George III; and faced with the anti-Scottish frenzies ofThe North Briton, Smollett had been destroyed. His health and his position injournalism were wrecked, and he retired to Italy to complete Humphry Clinker -a novel of the interactions of Scotland and Wales with a highly corrupt England— and to die soon after. Hume was not especially close to Smollett or to Bute,and his political outlook was very different from theirs, but the incident is verylikely to have been connected with Hume's conviction that political faction wasmaking the life of the man of letters impossible in England.

We may think of the leaders of the London radicals at this juncture as a break-away movement originating among the followers of William Pitt, who throve onpatriot and Old Whig rhetoric until he destroyed his position by accepting apeerage. But if Pitt was a lost leader to the Londoners and Americans, in Hume'seyes he was the evil genius - "that wicked Madman, Pitt"38 - who had donemost to precipitate the crisis of the sixties and seventies. If we anatomize the sinsand lunacies of Pitt as Hume saw them, we shall find three elements. In the firstplace, he had encouraged the growth of populist, factious, and fanatical rhetoricand had quite obviously done so for his own ends, in the manner of the classicaldemagogue. In the second place, however, he had been responsible for a vast andunneeded expansion of empire; for it was clear to Hume that a mixed form ofgovernment, in which authority and liberty, reason and passion, stood in a pre-carious relationship, ought not to expand,39 because - as Polybius had accuratelyprophesied in the case of Rome - to do so placed too great a strain on therelationship among its components. When empire was a popular cause it meantthe expansion of liberty and faction at the expense of reason and authority. Humewanted to see the Americans independent not because he thought the Londonradicals right but because he thought them foolish and wicked, like their evilangel Pitt, and wanted to see them deprived of their rallying cry. There are some

37Tobias Smollett, A History ofEngland (1757).38Hume to Wm. Strahan, 26 October 1775, Letters, 2:301.39Ibid., pp. 300-301, and the following two letters, pp. 303-5.


remarkably splenetic passages in the letters, in which Hume hopes to see Americain revolt, London depopulated, and authority restored to the nobility and gentryof both kingdoms.40 Empire breeds faction, and faction fanaticism.

Like Adam Smith in Scotland and Josiah Tucker in England, Hume desiredAmerican independence for the strictly Tory reason — Tory, that is, as that wordwould be used in the generation following his own — that empire had come to bea radical burden on the structure of British politics. The Whig regime had beenamong other things a balance between the forces of landed oligarchy, making forstability, and London commerce, making for empire. Faced with a choice be-tween the two, the conservative mind would sacrifice empire to stability withouthesitation — especially if it meant jettisoning Pitt's and Wilkes's radical London-ers along the way. Hume's increasing Anglophobia — his conviction that Englishfactions were the enemy of Scottish intellect - makes him prophesy the violent,not the easy, death of the constitution; but it would probably be a mistake toimpute to him any nationalist desire to see the Union undone, even if he wasdisposed to think the Anglo-Scottish experiment a failure. We make him a manof theory rather than practice, however, when we stress his inability to visualizeany via media between the violent and the easy death; he did not foresee theBritain of the younger Pitt, and he did not live to see it.

Hume had stiven all his life to adhere to the mainstream of Court Whig think-ing, accepting the rise of commerce and politeness in full awareness of the moraland political price they exacted. But the repudiation of empire, even in the formof a repudiation of faction, was bound to aggravate the anti-Whig and anti-commercial strain in his opinions. The third of his reasons for calling the elderPitt a wicked madman turns out to have been that the great war for empire thatPitt had waged had increased the national debt to near the point at which Humethought it must prove ruinous to society.41 Like Adam Smith on the one handand the English radicals on the other, Hume may have thought the Americancrisis had originated in an attempt to make the colonies contribute revenue to-ward the debt's reduction. Smith thought this demand not in itself unreasonable.If the colonists would not contribute to the costs of imperial partnership, theyshould cease to form part of it. Not being an Englishman, Smith did not feel itso imperative to maintain Parliament's authority as a necessary shibboleth.42 Butno less vehemently than Smith, Hume contended that empire was not worthhaving at the price of expanded debt and ought to be repudiated as the main

40Hume to Gilbert Elliot, 22 July 1768, Letters, 2:184; Hume to Strahan, 25 October 1769, Letters,2:210; Hume to Adam Smith, 8 February 1776, Letters, 2:308.

4lHume to Strahan, 11 March 1771, Letters, 2:237; Hume to Strahan, 22 July 1771, Utters, 2:248.42The Wealth of Nations, concluding chapter, "Of Public Debts," and the closing sentence of the

entire work.


cause of debt's expansion. Hume here seems to step right back into the traditionof Swift and Bolingbroke, denouncing Pitt, as they had once denounced Marl-borough, as the author of war, debt, and corruption; but there are importantdissimilarities, as well as similarities, between the positions.

Hume's conviction that national debt could reach the point of subverting thewhole fabric of society may be thought of as a blockage in his economic thinking,one that not even Smith could quite overcome or de Pinto persuade him to aban-don. But there is evidence that it had a wider meaning. As far back as Anne'sreign, we find signs that the overinvested society was perceived as one in whichthe value of everything was reducible to the fluctuating loan rate or the dailyprice of government stock and was no more than an index to the state of confi-dence in society's ability to meet its obligations in an unforeseeable future. Sucha society could be governed only by imaginary hopes and fears; it was the eco-nomic equivalent of religious superstition. Many analysts, and Hume amongthem, had argued that speculation, like other modes of the empire of passion,could be disciplined and rendered creative by subjection to the checks of politicalcontrol by the owners of land; but if the empire of debt expanded to include thevalue of land, all might still be lost. We can now see why Hume might feel thatthe expansion of debt in the war for empire was, if not a cause, at least a linkedphenomenon with faction in politics, barbarism in taste, and fanaticism in reli-gion. The demagogues of London - like those of Boston, if he ever thought aboutthem - were part of the state of things they affected to denounce, and it was amarvel that Gibbon should have produced a great work of letters in so insane asociety.43 The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century strands of Toryism in Humeare beginning to come together, in a pattern not altogether unlike that of Swift'srhetoric under Marlborough or Pope's under Walpole.

"Among many other marks of Decline," wrote Hume to Gibbon that March,"the Prevalence of Superstition in England, prognosticates the Fall of Philosophyand Decay of Taste."44 The language suggests that of Pope at the close of theDunciad, but what is more curious is that the fear of a revival of Puritan fanati-cism had not yet reached the heights it was to attain. Had Hume lived to hearabout the Gordon Riots in 1780, he would have had a new item to add to hisjeremiad. It is therefore the more piquant to discover, as a warm admirer ofHume's diagnosis of the American crisis, none other than Dr. Richard Price —dissenting minister, radical Whig, torchbearer of the natural rights of Ameri-cans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen, Unitarian millennialist, and futute object ofthe passionate denunciations of Josiah Tucker and Edmund Burke. And what

43Hume to Gibbon, 18 March 1776, Letters, 2:309-10; Hume to Adam Smith, 1 April 1776, Letters,2:312.

44Hume to Gibbon, Letters, 2:310.


Price most applauded in Hume was the support he could give to the reduction ofthe whole crisis to the single issue of the National Debt.45 Needless to say, Pricebelieved that the growth of debt had corrupted the executive and set it conspiringto take away the liberties of Americans first and Englishmen after; whereas Hume'spoint was that debt had encouraged faction and fanaticism — the very character-istics that, though he liked Price personally, he might well have joined Tuckerand later Burke in seeing him as embodying - while leaving the euthanasia ofexecutive corruption as the only if preferable alternative. Hume and Price are thetwo sides of the Tory-radical medal; and the question with which we are left inconclusion is that of how far Hume's irony, ambivalence, and skepticism werecontained within tensions that, in the year of his death, he saw as having passedout of control. He died peacefully, without patriotic lamentations for the fate ofhis country. But that may mean simply that he found it easier to surrenderexistence than to trouble about solving the riddles of history. Gibbon, whetheras an Englishman or as an expatriate, probably knew in his heart that what washappening to Britain was not a Decline and Fall. Hume seems to have builthimself the scenario of an almost insuperable contradiction. That his philosophyenabled him to quit the scene with equanimity we know; whether his historypermitted him to prognosticate the next act is a question we may leave open.

Hume was a name to conjure with among the American founders, and I willrevive the theme of ambivalence by adding a few words about that by way ofcoda. The late Douglass Adair showed46 how he might be considered a contrib-utor to Madison's tenth Federalist Paper, in which the conversion of passions andinterests into a multiplicity of groups checking and balancing one another be-comes a solution to the problem of the republic of great size, at payment of theusual cost of compromising the ideal of classical virtue. In Gerald Stourzh's mas-terly study of Alexander Hamilton, we see how the reading of Hume helped thegreatest of Federalists accept the view that the United States must be a commer-cial empire, with a strong system of executive patronage and public credit fi-nance.47 But though Hume could live with a politics of patronage, the combi-nation of empire and public credit sat ill with him. These were the very pointsat which Madison broke with Hamilton and moved into his alliance with Jeffer-son. To that purest of Commonwealth and Country thinkers, Hume was theposthumous ideologist of a conspiracy of British exporters, American merchants,and Federalist politicians to fasten the horrors of a Walpolean constitution uponthe infant republic. Jefferson was at pains to exclude him from the reading of

45 Price, Two Tracts on Civil Liberty, the War with America, and the Debts and Finances of the Kingdom(London, 1778); "Additional Observations," pp. xiii-xiv, 25, 38-39, 47, 51-52, 153n.

46Fame and the Founding Fathers (Williamsburg and New York: Institute for Early American Historyand Culture, 1974), pp. 93-123.

47Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970).


students at Charlottesville, and he encouraged the publication of a revised versionof the History of England by an obscure London democrat, with all the facts leftin and all the conclusions corrected.48 After death, as in life, Hume was a masterof the ambiguities of eighteenth-century historiography. It may be doubted thathe expected to escape them.

48Craig Walton, "Hume and Jefferson on the Uses of History," in D. Livingstone and J. King, eds.,Hume: A Re-evaluation (DeKalb, 111.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). It would be appro-priate, if iconoclastic, to apply to Jefferson Hume's observation that William Tytler "confesses tome & all the World that I am . . . right in my Facts, and am only wrong in my Inferences" (Humeto [Lord Elibank?}, [late 1759 or early 1760], Letters, 1:321).

8

Gibbon's Decline and Fall and theworld view of the Late

Enlightenment

In that otherwise memorable year, 1776, Edward Gibbon published the firstvolume of The Decline and Fall, carrying the narrative to the conversion of Con-stantine and concluding with the two famous chapters on the rise of Christianity.In 1781, he published the second and third volumes, carrying the narrative tothe deposition of Romulus Augustulus and concluding with a chapter whichanatomizes Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Spain, and Anglo-Saxon Britain, andis itself closed by what is really a separate essay - the "General Observations onthe Fall of the Roman Empire in the West." The three remaining volumes -which are concerned less with the Latin-Germanic West than with the "world'sdebate" between Byzantium and Islam in the East - did not appear until 1788.Gibbon died in 1794, at the outset of what would otherwise have been an exilefrom his beloved Lausanne occasioned by the wars between old Europe and revo-lutionary France. These dates reveal that The Decline and Fall is in chronology aproduct of the last years of the Enlightenment, the uneasy years between theAmerican and French revolutions; this essay will examine the respects in whichit is that also in spirit.1

Gibbon was a conservative in politics if a radical modernist in philosophy andreligion, and his scholarship belonged in some ways to a generation earlier thanhis own: to Oxford - however he may have disliked it in his own time - of theAncients against the Moderns and to Paris of the great years of the Academie des

From Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 287-303 . © 1977 American Society for Eigh-teenth-Century Studies; reprinted by permission.

!This essay develops and elaborates some points put forward in "Between Machiavelli and Hume:Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Vailof the Roman Empire, ed. G. W. Bowersock and John Clive (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). I hope tocomplete a full-length study, to be entitled Barbarism and Religion: Civil History in Gibbon's Declineand Fall.

143


Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres. But it is possible to disentangle from his vol-umes a historical sociology — or "philosophy of history" as the age would have it— based on the most advanced ideas of the French2 and Scottish Enlightenments:on Buffon and Mably rather than Montesquieu - whom he greatly if criticallyadmired - and on David Hume and Adam Smith rather than Voltaire - whomhe came to despise. And this sociology is also an ideology; that is, it presents aclear image of the world view of the Late Enlightenment - its view of its ownplace in history and of the forces which threatened its future. Gibbon was some-times evasive, but he was never complacent; he knew very well why he shouldthink of civilizations as fragile, and the most he allowed himself to hope was thatin the greatest of catastrophes, there were gains this side of savagery which couldnever be entirely lost. But it cannot be without a sense of irony and pathos thatwe read the words in which, on 1 May 1788, he presented his last volumes tothe public and wondered aloud if he would write any more history: "I am fairlyentitled to a year of jubilee; next summer and the following winter will rapidlypass away."3 Within not much more than a year, Gibbon's Europe was to bedestroyed by events which he certainly did not foresee; but in examining the fearsfor the future which he did entertain and temperately consider, we may inquirenot only into the extent of his pessimism, but into the extent to which his fearsforeshadowed what was to come.

Peter Gay has termed the Enlightenment "the rise of modern paganism," andit could not have persisted without that profound concern for the ancient worldwhich moved Gibbon to write his history. The rejection of Gallican and Triden-tine Catholicism, Calvinist and sectarian Protestantism, necessitated the erectionof a secular ideal which found its location in the ancient city. In Voltaire andHume, as well as in Gibbon, we find an avowed preference for Greco-Romanpolytheism as permitting philosophy to develop independently of the gods, whereasthe assertion — whether Platonic or Semitic — of a single godhead condemned itto the embrace of theology. Ancient philosophy, in the proper sense, is thereforea problem for Gibbon; since by "philosophy" he means nothing more or less thana methodical skepticism which frees the mind for its proper concerns, he is obligedto recognize it only in Lucretius or Cicero, and to dismiss the whole Athenianand Alexandrian endeavor as metaphysics and esprit de systeme.4 The revival ofPlatonism ranks among the forces which destroyed ancient civilization, and seems

2 For Gibbon's relation to French thought see the contributions of Robert Shackleton, GiuseppeGiarrizzo, Jean Starobinski, and Frank E. Manuel to Bowersock and Clive, eds.; and GiuseppeGiarizzo, Edward Gibbon e la cultura europea del Settecento (Bari, 1954).

3Decline and Fall, Vol. IV (1788), v (introduction). Subsequent references to The Decline and Fallare given as "DF," followed by the chapter number, and the volume and page number in the fifthedition of J . B. Bury (London, 1902-09). The quotation above may be found at Bury, I, xiii.

4DF, ii (Bury, I, 30). See also Gibbon's Essai sur Vetude de la litterature, chs. xlvii, lxxx, The Miscel-laneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Vol. IV (London, 1814).

Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment 145

at times an agency even more subversive than the Christian combination of rev-elation with superstition. Gibbon comes nearest to a tragic awareness when hefinds himself obliged to condemn the Emperor Julian — for whom he felt some-thing like love — as a neo-Platonic metaphysician and magician who betrayed thephilosophic paganism he struggled to revive, and the inferior of Athanasius instatemanship and public morality.5

It is possible to discover the sociology of religion — even the sociology of ideas- which enabled Hume and Gibbon to explain why the philosophy that flour-ished in an age of superstition must be flawed by systematization and metaphys-ics. Before we do so, however, we must consider the second reason why thesecular ideal of the Enlightenment had to be located in the ancient city. Philo-sophic man in a secular universe must act and contemplate the reason for hisactions, and it was in Athens and Rome that the philosophy of this combinationhad been worked out with the greatest finality. The hatred of metaphysics, how-ever, combined with a Polybian veneration for the laws and arms of Rome, en-sured that political philosophy would be admired in its Roman and Stoic ratherthan its Athenian and Academic form; the ideal city of the Enlightenment ispopulated not by illumined and contemplative philosopher kings, but by judi-ciously skeptical senators and magistrates. In consequence, the Anglo-FrenchEnlightenment (including its American variant) was condemned to carry on thecivic humanist and classical republican tradition of the Renaissance, and to seethe failure of ancient philosophy as one with the failure of ancient politics.

This does not mean that all philosophes were doctrinaire republicans: Voltaireremained in spirit a man of the grand siecle and the these royale to the end of hisdays. But it does mean that every philosophe was in some degree involved in thecontradictory vision of history which arose from accepting the Montesquieuanpremise that virtue was the principle of republics; Gibbon, as we shall see, wasno exception, and The Decline and Fall is written around this thesis. Ideally to bevirtuous - as either the Renaissance or the Enlightenment understood this crucialterm - a man should be the citizen of a republic. Property should give himindependence and the ability to bear arms in the city's cause, and the communityof arms-bearing proprietors should be the community of citizens obedient to thelaws which they themselves made. The citizenry might be distributed into anaristocracy and a democracy, and a superstitious many might worship gods whoma philosophic few knew to be only modes of worshiping the city, but this did notdetract from civic virtue so long as there was equality in arms and under the laws.The philosopher needed to be a senator, but was quite content to be a citizen.The element of contradiction in this vision - in which the Enlightenment wasdeeply entangled - arose from the republic's historical fragility. The republic was

5DF, xxi-xxiii; see particularly Bury, II, 361-81, 432-50, 473-78.


vulnerable to corruption, to political, moral, or economic changes which de-stroyed the equality on which it rested, and these changes might occur not acci-dentally, but in consequence of the republic's own virtue. Because it was virtuousit defeated its enemies; because it defeated its enemies it acquired empire; butempire brought to some citizens — chiefly military commanders and economicspeculators — the opportunity to acquire power incompatible with equality anduncontrollable by law, and so the republic was destroyed by success and excess.This was why Gibbon's original Capitoline vision of writing the history of thedecline and fall of the city6 became a commitment to write the history of thedecline and fall of the empire; quite simply, the empire had absorbed the cityand destroyed its virtue, as Polybius had prophesied, Sallust and Tacitus hadnarrated, Machiavelli and Montesquieu had analyzed; and it is why his final ver-dict on the Western empire was that "the story of its ruin is simple and obvious. . . the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness."7

But had this been all, Gibbon's history would have been an essentially simplenarrative of the effects of corruption — a corruption arising from the separation ofcivil from military virtue, started by Marius and Sulla, completed by Caesar andPompey, and institutionalized by Augustus, under whom the military institutionbegan to govern the empire independently of the republic and so embarked onthe long history of its own decay. This is Gibbon's narrative; it is his explanation,whenever he pauses to look back and analyze the Decline since the conquests ofthe republic. To the extent that this is so, he is still writing in the tradition ofTacitus whom he admired above any other historian; he can see only one locus ofcivic virtue, only one city destroyed by interaction with its empire, and Alexan-dria and Constantinople are part of the ruin because they are not cities in thepolitical sense and have no virtue. But in fact this is not all. By the time wereach the "General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,"from which the last quotation was taken, we know that the theme of corruptiondoes not explain everything, and that there are strands in Gibbon's pattern withwhich the "General Observations" themselves - found slightly disappointing bynearly every reader — fail to deal. The corruption of the republic and the princi-pate will not explain why Gibbon persisted in his design — after hesitation —through three more volumes of mainly Eastern history, or why, seven years laterand near the end of his labors, he was moved to the famous remark that he had"described the triumph of barbarism and religion."8 To find the strands in thepattern from which these concepts emerge, we must return first to the instabilityof virtue, and second to the relation between virtue and philosophy; and at eachpoint we shall encounter Gibbon's response to the greatest mind of his genera-

6It does not seem to matter whether or not he had this vision on the day or at the place he claimed.7DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 161). 8DF, lxxi (Bury, VII, 308-9).

Gibbon and the Late Enlightenment \Al

tion, that of David Hume, to whom he paid the highest compliment in his powerby calling him "le Tacite de l'Ecosse."9

It was not only the mutation of republic into empire as the main theme ofancient history which impressed the eighteenth-century mind with a sense of themutability of virtue. It was widely held that virtue had subsequently been re-stored in a barbaric form by the Gothic and Germanic invaders, who had set upprimitive but effective communities of armed freeholders, to which feudal rela-tionships had been no more than marginal. There are traces of this perspective inGibbon's first volume: he tells us that "the fierce giants of the north broke in and. . . restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution often centuries,freedom again became the happy parent of taste and science."10 But the image ofGothic freedom, like that of primitive Roman virtue, rested on the assumptionthat the form of property which gave the individual arms and independence,liberty and virtue, must necessarily be land; and since the last years of the sev-enteenth century, it had been a commonplace to inquire what had been the con-sequence of the rise of commerce and of movable forms of property at the end ofthe supposedly agrarian Middle Ages. A quarrel of the ancients and modernsensued: to some it seemed that the rise of commerce had spelled the end of virtue,as formerly free arms-bearing citizens had become content to pay mercenaries todefend them and absolute monarchs to govern them, the better to enjoy thewealth, leisure, and cultivation which commerce made possible. To these an-cients - Thomas Jefferson among them - Europe under the enlightened monar-chies was like Gibbon's age of the Antonines, enjoying an interlude of prosperityand politeness under the protection of a military establishment which law andliberty no longer controlled, and which must sooner or later become tyrannousand degenerate. But there were moderns — Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith,and Gibbon — who conceded that virtue had rested upon a foundation of armsand agriculture, but insisted that it had been so inhumanly harsh and restrictiveas hardly to deserve the name; hence, they said — and Jefferson agreed — thenightmare Utopias of Lycurgus' laws or Plato's republic.11 The rise of commerceand culture had been worth the loss of virtue which it had entailed; it had vastlyenhanced the human capacity for production and consumption, exchange, inter-dependence, and sympathy, and on this foundation there might be erected newethical systems which displayed how man's love of himself might be convertedinto love of his fellow social beings. But the ancient image of virtue was neveroverthrown or abandoned, and in consequence it had to be recognized that thevirtue of commercial and cultivated man was never complete, his freedom andindependence never devoid of the elements of corruption. No theory of human

9J. E. Norton, ed., The Letters of Edward Gibbon (London, 1956), II, 107. wDf, ii (Bury, I, 58)."Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, IV, 6, 8; V, 19; XX, 1; Machiavellian Moment, pp. 491-92.


progress could be constructed which did not carry the negative implication thatprogress was at the same time decay, that culture entailed some loss of freedomand virtue, that what multiplied human capacities also fractured the unity ofhuman personality. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had not restored thisunity, but had learned to live, resignedly or hopefully, with personalities sun-dered by history. They were already finding themselves cast in the role of Faustto the Mephistopheles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Gibbon, in this analysis, emerges as a modern, and one relatively untroubledby the accusing finger of Rousseau; Lausanne was at a safe distance from Geneva.That is, he accepts the thesis that the Decline and Fall was ultimately due to theexpansion of the empire, the professionalization of the armies, the institution ofthe principate, and the decay of virtue, but while he agrees that commerce, po-liteness, and luxury grew up behind the shield of the principate and the legions,he will not accept that luxury is to be considered a major cause of the Decline.There were more radical contemporaries who held that it was the affluent societywhich paid mercenaries to defend it, so that wealth was a cause of the loss ofvirtue; in their view of Roman history, the rise of the mercenary legions wenttogether with the rise of the equites and the publkani, and they started from Sallustrather than from Tacitus. Gibbon - though he had written an essay about thedubious financial dealings of the tyrannicide hero Brutus12 - resisted this inter-pretation. He was regularly at pains to point out that it was despotism, notluxury, which corroded the ability of ancient society to defend itself, and thatthe relation between despotism and luxury was not a simple one. When he paused,in the chapter which recounts Alaric's sack of Rome, to review the last stage inthe history of the senatorial aristocracy, he made or strongly implied two strikingpoints: the first, that the luxury of the senators was the effect of their living inan economy of conspicuous consumption, not of profitable exchange; the second,that if we look back into the primitive age of republican virtue, we find that thewarrior yeoman was regularly plunged into debt because he preferred going offwith the legions and seizing the lands of others to peaceably increasing by indus-try the yield of his own farm.13 Virgil's Georgics - Gibbon had written in hisyouth - were written at Augustus' instance to persuade the soldier-farmer tocivilize himself.14 We can infer from this that Gibbon was awake to the modernargument — found in Defoe, Montesquieu, Hume, and others — that ancientvirtue was warlike because it was economically primitive, and that a productivemarket economy had no need of virtue in this sense and would not be corruptedby its disappearance.

An implication would be that eighteenth-century commercial Europe was notthreatened, like Rome, by corruption from within. Gibbon in 1781 had some12 "Digression on the Character of Brutus," Miscellaneous Works, IV, 9 5 - 1 1 1 .15DF, xxxi (Bury, III, 292-95 , 302-3). l4Essai, pp. xix-xxii; Miscellaneous Works, IV, 32-37 .


personal motivation for presenting this argument. The author, possibly CharlesJames Fox, of some satiric verses on Gibbon's dual role as historian of the Romanempire and parliamentary placeman under the North administration had written:"His book well describes / How corruption and bribes / O'erthrew the greatempire of Rome; / And his writings declare / A degen'racy there / Which hisconduct exhibits at home."15 The revolt of the American provinces, as a matterof historical correctness, faced Britain with a Social War rather than a Declineand Fall, and came about precisely because the institutions of British liberty hadnot merged in those of imperial government; but it would not have been surpris-ing if Gibbon had been at pains to destroy the very fashionable, almost radical-chic, parallel between contemporary Britain or Europe and Sallustian or TaciteanRome. We have found that he had the means of doing so. But his historicalintellect was a good deal stronger than its ideological promptings, and when wereach the "General Observations" at the end of Volume Three, we find this themepresent indeed, but played down almost to vanishing point. Gibbon does indeedstress that the late empire was a military despotism which had destroyed its owncapacity to replace and renew its virtue, whereas modern Europe is, he says, agreat republic,16 composed of diverse states which by emulation maintain eachother's military virtue — though he also says that the advanced technology of warhas rendered this virtue neither possible nor necessary17 — correct each other'sforms of government, and by trade and competition strengthen each other'seconomies.18 In this peaceable and progressive society, military and political vir-tue are, in a way which recalls Montesquieu, kept at a level of moderate but notessential importance, and there is no need to worry too much about their neces-sary imperfection. But what renders the "General Observations" puzzling anddisappointing to most readers is, one suspects, that this theme is dealt with interms far less of internal decay than of the extreme improbability of barbarianassault from without. Gibbon elects to consider how Europe would stand up to anew nomad invasion, though he prefaces his observations with the admission thatthe Russians and the Chinese have reduced the nomads to a species verging onextinction.19 American critics like to believe that he did this in order to avert hiseyes from the painful spectacles of Saratoga and Yorktown;20 but it is hard to findthat the British cared enough about America to experience its loss as a trauma,and this emphasis on the nomads can be explained — the explanation will be

15 There are various printings ot these verses, of which the first ("King George, in a fright / LestGibbon should write / The story of Britain's disgrace . . .") is the best known. They are said tohave been written in Fox's copy of The Decline and Fall, and found there when his books wereauctioned.

16DF, xxxviii, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 163). l7DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 166-67).18DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 165-66). 19DF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 164, note 6).20See Bowersock and Clive, eds., pp. 30, 65, 182-83, 239-40. I am unpersuaded by the contention

that Gibbon means "America" when he mentions "Armorica."


partly ideological - in terms of Gibbon's developing ideas on the sociology ofbarbarism.

Theorists in search of a modern equivalent for ancient virtue had already placedthemselves on a road which, for Anglophones at any rate, led from John Locketo Adam Smith. The mind formulated its ideas in response to the sensations andobjects encountered in experience; as men advanced in productive capacity throughthe successive stages of history, they enlarged their own minds by multiplying theobjects to which they responded. In chapter nine of The Decline and Fall, Gibbonreviewed Tacitus' De moribus Germanorum in the light of this body of theory. TheGermans were savages, he said, possessed of neither money nor letters, the mediaof exchange which multiplied and preserved the objects nourishing the mind,21

and this was the case because their social condition was preagricultural.22 Theyneither labored nor produced, and were consequently totally incapable of contem-plation and almost incapable of action. Self-awareness was an existential burdenof which they could discharge themselves only by violence;23 war was their onlyactivity, and honor — which was a fierce sense of personal though hardly of civilliberty — as near as they got to virtue.24 If honor and liberty are precivil charac-teristics, Gibbon is devoid of serious nostalgia for the primitive virtues; he wouldhave rather liked to believe in the authenticity of Ossian,25 but he knew too wellwhat Hume would have to say on the subject26 and his own thesis commandedhim to believe that virtue was civil and could exist only when the barbarian hadbeen socialized into productive capacity and cooperative labor. He next con-sidered the subject of barbarism in the very important chapter twenty-six, nearthe end of Volume Two, when the approach of the Goths obliged him to analyzethe Huns and write a chapter on "the manners of the pastoral nations."

The notion of a pastoral, shepherd, or nomad stage, preceding agriculture inthe order of historical development, was one recently discovered by eighteenth-century social theorists.27 Adam Smith, as Gibbon could have known, arguedthat this was the stage at which private ownership and specialization of function,class division and consequently government, first made their appearance;28 butGibbon put forward a very different evaluation. All shepherd societies, he ar-gued, were essentially alike,29 because they presented humanity at its nearest to

2lDF, ix (Bury, I, 218-20). 22DF, ix (Bury, I, 222-23). 2iDF, ix (Bury, I, 221).24DF, ix (Bury, I, 225-26). Note (a) the closeness of this argument to Montesquieu's concept of

honneur; (b) its application to the condition of women in barbaric and civilized society (Bury, I,227-28).

25 DF, vi(Bury, I, 129-30).2 6 See H u m e ' s le t te r as g iven in G i b b o n ' s Memoirs of my Life, ed . Georges A . Bonnard ( N e w Y o r k ,

1966), p. 168.2 7 R . L. M e e k , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage ( C a m b r i d g e , 1975) .2 8 S m i t h , Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, I , 1, 2 ; Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed . R. L. Meek ,

D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978), 404-5.29DF, xxvi (Bury, III, 71). See also Pocock, "Gibbon and the Shepherds: The Stages of Society in

the Decline and Fall," History of European Ideas II, (1981), 193-202.


the animal condition; since herdsmen did not labor but followed their grazingflocks, they developed no cultural individuality or diversity and their principalcharacteristic was a uniform mobility and ferocity in war. Gibbon was merelyrepeating in a cruder form the analysis he had already given of the Germans, andwhen he lays it down that this is the final analysis of barbarian society, to whichby the nature of the case there can be nothing to add, we may feel that he isnarrowing and indeed closing his equipment as a historian of culture. As a matterof fact, he is vastly enhancing his spatial capacity; chapter twenty-six is the pre-lude to the great panoramas of the later Decline and Fall, in which we see theinteractions of the Desert with the Sown reaching all the way from Rome toChina - Joseph de Guignes's Histoire des Huns7'0 is one of the seminal books inGibbon's reading — but as regards the history of Western Europe, the reductionof barbarism to a negatively characterized pastoralism does indeed enable him tocarry out a gigantic and tendentious abridgment. As he describes, in chaptersthirty-seven and thirty-eight, Germanic society taking shape in the conqueredprovinces of the West, the Gothic or Frankish settler is consistently presented asa hunter, shepherd, and warrior, exploiting an agrarian society he could nevershape for himself. The first feudal lords who appear in Merovingian Gaul areessentially hunters, who conduct razzias to supply themselves with serfs and cat-tle, and let land revert to forest to supply themselves with game.31

Gibbon is systematically if not avowedly destroying the myth of Gothic agrar-ian virtue, by whose means feudal society had so often been equated with theprimitive republic of warrior freeholders. His modernism appears at its extremewhen he virtually confronts nomadism with urbanism and permits agriculture,"the foundation of manufactures,"32 to appear only as the precondition of thelatter. A determination to have none of the fashionable thesis that commercialsociety had degenerated from an agricultural condition helps explain why the"General Observations" do not consider Europe as threatened from within, butonly by a purely conceptual nomad danger from without. Agriculture appears inthe "General Observations" in two roles only: first, as the instrument by whichcivilization eradicates savagery - the Russians are plowing up the steppe, Englishnavigators are introducing useful plants and animals to Polynesia;33 second, asthe indestructible germ by which civilization survives catastrophe - since it de-pends neither on individual genius nor on complex social diversification, thepeasant household is unlikely to forget what it has learned about the arts of tillagein even the greatest of disasters.34 The happy peasant, virtuous because unspe-cialized, yet specialized above the level of savagery, has made his reappearance

30"Histoire Generate des Huns, des Turcs, des Mogols et des autres Tartares Occidentaux. Par M. de Guignes. . . , 5 vols. (Paris, 1756).

ilDF, xxxviii (Bury, IV, 131-33). i2DF, ii (Bury, I, 53).55DF, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 164, 168-69 and note 15).34DF, "General Observations" (Bury, IV, 168).


after being held back to the last page of Volume Three. Not even Gibbon couldexorcise him from the eighteenth-century mind forever.

The relation of barbarism to religion can be explored when we realize that theEnlightenment's sociology of barbarism, which Gibbon knew very well, was alsoa sociology of superstition, and rather less certainly of fanaticism; superstitionand fanaticism being the two categories into which the philosophes distributedmost religious phenomena. In Gibbon's early Essai sur Vetude de la litterature, andin the two masters to which that work chiefly refers, Freret and Hume35 — wecan read how the savage, idly and fancifully (because nonproductively) respond-ing to the phenomena of experience, erects the multitude of gods and mythswhich make up the religions of superstition. Later in the progress of societyappears the archaic philosopher, who endeavors to reduce religion from absurdityto rationality, but constructs the system of abstract ideas and occult qualities towhich the philosophe gives the name of metaphysics. Should the metaphysicianexcogitate as part of his system the otherwise reasonable concept of a single god,there will arise a theology - one of those fatal unions of superstition with meta-physics for which the correct term is fanaticism or enthusiasm.36 This was thebaleful legacy of Plato, whose error was to think the godhead a subject for system-atic philosophy;37 it was an error natural enough in the historical context, butnot one to which the ancient city was condemned. As empire and commerce madepossible the comparative study of gods and metaphysics, the philosopher-magis-trates of the ruling city could reduce philosophy to that rational and tolerantskepticism, and methodical curiosity, which is all Gibbon ever means by theword.38 The skepticism of the ruling few forms a happy enough partnership withthe superstition of the unreflective many, because neither attribute much truth-status to what they say; but the metaphysicians persist outside the pale, fanati-cally asserting the truth of what they take to be philosophy. The Platonic legacyis the potential enemy of the Roman order.39

Outside the natural history of religion altogether lie the great Semitic andIranian40 monotheisms, founded not on philosophy but on revelation. There isno sociological explanation of the prophet: he must be either a madman or animpostor - preferably, because more rationally, the latter;41 but he erects a fa-naticism more terrifying than that of the metaphysician, because it has no sharein the progress of society from superstition to philosophy. The Jews, for whom35 For this relat ionship see Giarrizzo's vo lume and his essay in Bowersock and Clive, eds.36 H u m e ' s The Natural History of Religion was one of Gibbon ' s pr incipal sources; and see the quota t ion

from Freret in Miscellaneous Works, IV, 16«.3 7 DF, ii (Bury, I , 30); xv (Bury, I I , 76) ; xxi (Bury, I I , 3 3 5 - 3 6 ) .38 DF, i i , is Gibbon ' s chief account of this ancient esprit philosophique.39 See the account of the neo-Platonic revival at the end of DF, xiii (Bury, I , 392—93).4 0 DF, vii i , is largely an account of Zoroastr ianism (Bury, I , 1 9 7 - 2 0 3 ) .4 I S e e the accounts of Zoroaster , O d i n (DF, x; Bury, I , 2 4 0 - 4 1 ) and especially M u h a m m a d (DF, 1;

Bury, 333-96).


Gibbon has the philosopher total abhorrence, kept their god to themselves sojealously that the wars which destroyed them did nothing to the fabric of anempire in which they had no part;42 but they left behind them the dangerousknowledge that the unity of the godhead might be more convincingly assertedon the foundation of prophecy than on that of philosophy. The way was preparedfor that union of Mosaic revelation with Platonic metaphysics which was whatGibbon really dreaded in Christianity.

Gibbon saw the Decline and Fall as the failure of ancient skepticism, but notmerely as the triumph of popular superstition. In the history of Christianity,superstition played a late and ambivalent role; it was preceded in the patristic eraby fanaticism and enthusiasm. At a time when the populace of the empire, robbedof belief in their gods by the belated discovery that their masters thought themridiculous,43 were becoming exposed to a variety of restatements of the Jewishand Persian revelations, the masters themselves — perhaps because their role asmagistrates was ceasing to satisfy in the decay of the principate — were turningto a variety of neo-Platonic and Gnostic metaphysics; and this apostasy of thephilosophers played a major role in both the triumph of Christianity and theDecline and Fall. The great heresies which destroyed both civil and ecclesiasticaldiscipline were all, Gibbon emphasizes, of neo-Platonic and Gnostic origin;44

and the same disastrous ways of thinking were responsible for the failure of Julianto restore philosophic magistracy and virtue. Julian was the inferior of Athanasiusin these qualities, and Athanasius is one of a chain of Church Fathers — Am-brose,45 Gregory the Great,46 and John Chrysostom47 are others — of whom Gib-bon writes with far more respect than mockery. The reason seems to be that theseFathers were leaders, effective and not without statesmanship, of their peoples inAlexandria, Milan, Rome, and Constantinople; the Christian republic — as Gib-bon repeatedly calls it — was being led by Christian virtue.48 It is true that thisvirtue was fanatical; both leaders and people were governed by a union of proph-ecy and metaphysics. It was anticivic and otherworldly, and could not be har-nessed to the defense of the empire. But Gibbon was beginning to make use ofHume's distinction49 between enthusiasm, which was fanatical and intolerant butdrove men to assert their liberties against their rulers, and superstition, which

42Gibbon's main account of Judaism is in DF, xv (Bury, II, 2-6). All other references to the Jewsdisplay occasional pity and unvarying contempt. Observe that Hadrian's Jewish war is not con-sidered an exception to the general peace of the empire (DF, i; Bury, I, 29 and note). I suspect thisfootnote to be deliberate and not an afterthought; cf. Bowersock and Clive, p. 64, n. 17.

43DF, xv (Bury, II, 55-56).44DF, xxi (Bury, II, 336-54); xxxvii (Bury, IV, 95); xlvii (Bury, V, 96-106).45DF, xxvii (Bury, III, 155-61, 174-76).46DF, xlv (Bury, V, 33-38). 47DF, xxxii (Bury, III, 374-80).48For this language see DF, xv, passim; and cf. DF, xix (Bury, II, 328).49Hume, Essays, "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm." See also Pocock, "Superstition and Enthusiasm

in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighteenth-Century Life VIII, 1 (1982), 83-94.


was passive and law-abiding but disposed men to accept their rulers even whenthese were priests. Christian enthusiasm wins its greatest victory in The Declineand Fall when the temples of paganism are destroyed under the Theodosians; butalmost immediately it is transformed into superstition, as the cults of saints andrelics and shrines and miracles renew ancient polytheism in a Christian guise.30

About all this it is evident that Gibbon had ambivalent feelings, and sawhistory as an ambivalent process. Religion as superstition had originally been anaspect of barbarism, and it would be possible to see its revival as a return tobarbarism. In chapter thirty-seven Christianity is shown reaching its nadir in theform of monasticism, and it is emphasized that the monk, deprived of property,the reward of his labor, and all membership in society, regresses to an apathyvery like that of the savage; we are even told that one or two monks were ofshepherd origin, and that a certain sect of solitaries grazed in the field like beasts.51

But in the same chapter Christianity is shown helping to convert the barbarians,and Ulfilas is called the Moses of his branch of the Goths because he taught themletters and led them across the Danube to fertile pastures where their nomadismmight become settled.52 The image of agriculture has flashed across the pageagain, and it is used to distinguish between religion as a decivilizing and as acivilizing agency.

But religion as enthusiasm belonged to a more complex, because more civi-lized, phase in the historical process. Once Gibbon's knowledge of Hume re-minded him that liberty and virtue might rest - as in the Reformation and thePuritan Revolution they had rested53 - on a foundation of fanaticism, he wasbound to remember his modernist skepticism on the subject of virtue. There wassomething to be said for superstition, if it was compatible with the rule of en-lightened and tolerant magistrates; but in recounting "the corruption of Chris-tianity" (his own phrase)54 in the Theodosian age, he had reached the brink ofthat standard Protestant polemic against the rule of superstition by priests, towhich as a philosophe he was in no way indisposed. In the later volumes of TheDecline and Fall, however, this polemic, while of course present, is relativelyundeveloped. These volumes carry out a plan, laid down as far back as VolumeOne in 1776,55 of pursuing the history of the Eastern Empire beyond the fall ofthe Western; we are not to look to them for a history of how modern Europe,that great republic of states, emerged from the respublica Christiana which hadsucceeded the Roman empire. But there is an extraordinary chapter in VolumeFive — chapter fifty-four — in which Gibbon deduces the history of Protestantism

50DF, xxviii(Bury, III, 188-215).51 Bury, IV, 70—73. The shepherds turned monk may be found at pp. 64, note 30, and 73 (Simeon

Stylites).52Bury, IV, 76-77. 53DF, xvi (Bury, II, 138-39). 54DF, xxxvii (Bury, IV, 57).55Bury, I, v—vii.


from origins not only Greek but neo-Platonic. The Gnostics begat the Paulicians,it seems, the Paulicians the Albigensians, the Albigensians the Western hereticsin general, and these begat the Protestants.56

Gibbon is examining the interweavings of the rational and the enthusiasticcomponents in Protestantism. At the end of this chapter he indicates what heapplauds in contemporary religion - the restoration of the Antonine Enlighten-ment as the rule of an undogmatic clergy over congregations who no longer knowor much care what they are meant to believe - and what he fears: those "Armi-nians, Arians and Socinians . . . who preserve the name without the substance ofreligion, who indulge the license without the temper of philosophy." A footnotedraws the attention of the civil magistrate to the teachings of Joseph Priestley.57

It is not known what Gibbon said if he ever heard that mobs, set on by magis-trates, had destroyed Priestley's house in Birmingham, but this was just the sortof thing he feared. In Priestley's blend of unitarianism, materialism, and millen-nialism, he diagnosed the union of philosophy with fanaticism, and the structureof this chapter tells us that he saw Priestley as a second Arius, who would havebeen quite at home in the streets of fourth-century Alexandria. Gibbon as anundergraduate had been converted to Catholicism by reading Bossuet, and hisreturn to Protestantism, even as a convenient home for an English philosophe, hadnever been free from uneasiness. He chose after 1781 to write the history ofbarbarism and religion in a new form: the history of how a prophet-legislator hadcivilized a pastoral people by teaching them enthusiasm for a religion of theirown, and set the house of Islam at war with the city of Constantine.

Gibbon feared in Priestley exactly what Burke feared in Richard Price: thedemocratic fanaticism which they and many others thought was latent in EnglishDissent. After the Gordon Riots Gibbon wrote: "forty thousand Puritans, suchas they might be in the time of Cromwell, have started out of their graves";58

after the French Revolution, Burke wrote that nine-tenths of the Dissenters weredevoted to its principles.59 This analysis of The Decline and Fall - which disen-tangles some of its preoccupations without suggesting that these explain why itwas written - indicates that Gibbon thought his world had laid the ghosts ofvirtue and corruption, but still went in fear of the spirit of fanaticism. The thesisof chapter fifty-four is not anti-Illuminist nonsense; there was enough neo-Pla-tonism and Gnosticism abroad in the England of Blake, Shelley, and Coleridgeto give us something to think about. But of the French Revolutionaries them-selves, Gibbon said that they were fanatics, and also that they were barbarians;and he endorsed, like most gentlemen of his time, Burke's analysis and denun-

56Bury, VI, 110-29.57Bury, VI, 129, note 49. See also Letters, II, 320-23 , and Memoirs, pp. 171-72.™Letters, II, 243.59 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T. W. Copeland (Cambridge, 1958-69), VI, 418-22 .


ciation of the fanaticism of natural right.60 But there was room for another analy-sis, which Gibbon might perhaps have written: that of the fanaticism of civicvirtue. We cannot regret that Gibbon died when he did; to think of him ekingout an exile in a London he never much liked, aware that some nasty Frenchcommissary was living in the villa at Lausanne, and obliged to meet Wilberforceat dinner parties, should convince us that the age of Pitt was no age for him. Butwe must wish we had his account of Robespierre at the Feast of the SupremeBeing.60Letters, III, 321; for Burke, III, 216. Epithets such as "wolves," "savages," "cannibals" abound in

Gibbon's correspondence in 1792.

Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke,and Price

A study in the varieties of eighteenth-century conservatism

I

Early in 1946, an assistant lecturer and a lecturer in history found themselvessharing an office, as it would now be called, of Victorian granite and fiberboardpartitions, forming part of what had been a gallery running above the archway ofthe Rolleston Avenue entrance to the old buildings of what was then CanterburyUniversity College in the University of New Zealand. Both were newly appointedto their duties, the one just graduated and the other just returned from the wars.Between them, they increased the teaching members of their department fromtwo to four. Both were men of independent personality who came to think it amatter of credit to each that they shared their quarters so cordially. In time,however, their ways parted. The assistant lecturer went in pursuit of a doctorateand entered upon a complex orbit that was to pass through Canterbury's gravi-tational field again. The lecturer, a more stable and powerful luminary unafraidof dog days, remained to become a professor of history and in due course vice-chancellor of the University of Canterbury in the times of its centennial and itsmigration to a new campus. Under whatever signs are now in the ascendant, theassistant lecturer offers the lecturer an essay upon a subject, and related to apersonality, both of which have always meant much to him.

If the writings and addresses of Neville Phillips were to be collected, thelanguage and mind of Edmund Burke would be found to have colored themdeeply, and there would also be found a continuing concern with the conservativetemper, coupled with the knowledge that this temper commands something morecomplex than surrender to it. In his writings on eighteenth-century history, there

This essay, in an earlier form, first appeared in Essays Presented to Professor N. C. Phillips, edited byMarie Peters, S. A. M. Adshead, and J. E. Cookson and printed for limited distribution at theUniversity of Canterbury. Reprinted here by arrangement with the editors.

157


may be found the troubled and often troubling presence of Burke as a politicalactor, who not only responded unforgettably to the melee of his times but gen-erated from the depths of a tormented personality a secondary melee of his own."From chaos and cobwebs could spring even Burke."1 He was capable of extrav-agance and even radicalism, and some modern exponents of the political order towhich he belonged have detested him for these qualities;2 yet it is a commonplacethat conservatism, properly understood, can exist only in response to radical chal-lenge, and to find a potential radicalism latent within the conservative himself isnot therefore surprising. But the commonplace just mentioned raises a problemconcerning conservatism in the age of Burke, which cannot be resolved throughthe study even of Burke alone. In the American and still more in the FrenchRevolution, there appeared for the first time a predominantly secular revolution-ary challenge, but the regimes against which it was directed were Whig as wellas Anglican, Enlightened as well as Tridentine, and had just been celebrated byGibbon as the most secular ruling order Europe had known since Roman antiq-uity.3 We are not to forget the religiosity of Burke or Coleridge, Maistre orChateaubriand, but we are faced with the problem of diagnosing both revolutionand conservatism for the first time as secular principles, at work in a world wheresociety and history counted for more than the church. There is an apparent par-adox, however, in speaking of conservatism's existing "for the first time"; itcannot be a simple continuation of established ways and manners, but must mo-bilize them to meet a challenge never presented before. In the language of JosephLevenson, a traditionalism is other than a tradition.4

We think of Burke as the philosopher of traditions: natural law and commonlaw, Roman piety and prudence, Christian faith and medieval chivalry; no doubtthis is how he intended his readers to think. But we must also see him as theactive exponent and defender of Whig aristocratic politics, and not only was hisattitude toward this order marked by the ambivalence of the novus homo, but theorder itself was in fact far from traditional. Its pillars were the Revolution Settle-ment, the Toleration Act, the Bank of England, and the Septennial Act, andalthough the first of these might (but need not) be defended in the name of theancient constitution, the others were in increasing degree defiantly modern andneeded to be defended against "country," "Commonwealth," and "patriot" at-tacks whose appeal was to the symbols of Roman and Gothic antiquity. If con-servatism is the defense of the existing order, the conservatism of the eighteenthcentury was the defense of a revolution. If this revolution had (like not a few

^rom verses by Hester Thrale, quoted by Douglas N. Archibald, "Edmund Burke arid the Con-servative Imagination: Part II," Colby Library Quarterly XIII, 1 (1977), pp. 19-41, p. 19-

2Namier's dislike of Burke was vehement and transmitted to his pupils.3 See in particular, "General Considerations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West," History

of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. Ill (1781), chap. 38.4Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, 3 vols. (London, 1958), vol. 1, p. xiii.

Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 159

others) ended in oligarchy and the restriction of politics, this was not enough tomake its defense a simple exercise in traditionalism. There was much to be de-fended that was not traditional at all, but must be defended on the grounds ofits modernity. We already know how the apologists of Walpole developed astrategy in which modernism itself becomes a conservative argument,5 and weare told that we must defend what is because it is all that we have achieved - all,indeed, that we have. To reconcile such an argument with piety toward the "littleplatoon" (by which Burke meant the French and English aristocracies) is difficult,but not impossible. Once we see it, however, as a central strand in Whig con-servatism, a dilemma must necessarily arise within the accepted interpretation ofBurke as traditionalist. If such elements are present in his thought, how do theycoexist with those we have learned to recognize? If they are not present, why arethey absent?

II

This essay is designed to explore these problems by confronting Burke with oneof the most extraordinary and pungent personalities of his times: an intellect asconservative as his own, yet both like and unlike it in a challenging combinationof ways. Josiah Tucker (1711—99), who became dean of Gloucester in 1758, isremembered as the author of economic tracts that rank him as a lesser pioneer ofthe free-trade school, but he was a good deal more than that.6 The Seven Years'War gave him a passionate hatred of wars for the sake of trade,7 and of thepolitical alliance between Pitt and the London aldermen and liverymen that seemedto others (including Hume) to combine the worst elements of chauvinism anddemocracy. At least from 1766 Tucker believed that the problem of relationswith America could be solved only by a total separation:8 a declaration of Britain'sindependence from her colonies rather than the other way around. He came tobelieve that American resistance to parliamentary authority, English clamors forparliamentary reform, and Dissenting pressures for relief from the Test and Cor-poration Acts were aspects of a single conspiracy against the constitution by whathe called "new-light men" — those ultraliberal descendants of the Puritans whomBurke had named "the very dissidence of dissent." Tucker also believed that the

5 Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge,Mass., 1968), pp. 127—37. Kramnick considers Walpole to be the author of the ideas publishedin his defense - a doubtful ascription.

6See George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (New York,1981), which reached me after all but the last part of this essay was completed.

7 See the letter of February 11, 1758, in which Tucker tells Kames that his Bristol parish "is becomea hell on earth," since the wealthier inhabitants are investing in privateers to plunder French tradeand in brothels to provide them with seamen. Quoted in Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 166-7.

8 A Letter from a Merchant in London to His Nephew in America (London, 1766), esp. pp. 4 4 - 9 . Re-printed in Four Tracts together with Two Sermons on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester,1774), pp. 128—30. (The sermons are separately paginated.)


ideological foundation of their knavish politics was Locke's theory of the forma-tion of civil society, against which he wrote a Treatise Concerning Civil Government,published in 1781. This seems to be the first major refutation of Lockean politicssince that of Charles Leslie, the nonjuror, nearly eighty years before,9 and it iscertainly the first to find in Locke the radical populist and democrat who hasbegun to reemerge in recent research.10 Tucker's primary bete noire came to bethe tradition of individualist natural right, which he insisted had been inheritedfrom Locke by Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin, Jean JacquesRousseau, and other "republicans," "patriots," and "democrats" of the 1770s.He respected Priestley and had an ironic admiration for Rousseau.11 Price hedisliked personally as well as ideologically,12 and the Treatise Concerning CivilGovernment is a blast against Price in his pro-American vein, just as Burke's Re-flections on the Revolution in France, a decade later, is a blast against Price's pro-French utterances. Yet Tucker had an equal and associated antipathy to Burke;he thought Dissenting propaganda had contributed to Burke's election for Bris-tol,13 and in 1775-6 Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America and Price's Obser-vations on Civil Liberty seemed to him to reveal the two men in hypocritical alli-ance. There is a strange triangle of repulsions here, which furnishes this essaywith its title; yet it takes us only to the brink of the differences between Tucker'sdefense of civil authority and Burke's.

Tucker was an original, independent to the point of eccentricity. His workswere nearly all printed in Gloucester to be sold in London, an indication that hewrote unsupported by any party connection, and when accused by Burke of beinga court flatterer intriguing for promotion, Tucker declared in print that he wouldaccept no preferment offered him, "SO HELP ME GOD."14 He was, perhaps, in

9 J . P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 6 3 -4; Gordon J . Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975), pp. 220-2 . Hume'sessay "Of the Social Contract" may be considered another refutation.

10John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge, 1969); Julian H. Franklin, John Lockeand the Problem of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1978); Richard Ashcraft, "The Two Treatises and theExclusion Crisis: The Problem of Lockean Political Theory as Bourgeois Ideology," in Pocock andAshcmft, John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles, 1980), and "RevolutionaryPolitics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory," PoliticalTheory VIII, 4 (1980), pp. 429 -86 .

11A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (London, 1781), p . 22: "Dr. PRIESTLY, the fairest, themost open, and ingenuous of all Mr. LOCKE's Disciples, excepting honest, undissembling ROUS-SEAU . . . " Cf. p. 236: " . . . except honest ROUSSEAU, who is generally consistent, whether inTruth, or Error, and perhaps also Dr. PRIESTLY." For the full title of Tucker's Treatise see n. 52,this chapter.

12 A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies (Gloucester,1116), pp. xii-xiii, xiv, 87: "And you too, my ingenious Doctor, you, a Writer on moral Obli-gation, could condescend to lend your assisting Hand in this good Work"; pp. 88—93.

13 A Series of Answers, p . 70.14 Burke's innuendo is in the speech on American taxation {The Works of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke,

Rivington edition, London, 1826, vol. II, p . 413); Tucker's oath in A Series of Answers, p. 97. SeeShelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 194-5 , 197, 243 -5 .

Josiab Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price 161

no great danger of a bishopric. His belief that it was as foolish to make war forthe subjugation of the colonies as it was wicked to support their claims to im-munity was too much even for Samuel Johnson,15 who had no aversion to inde-pendence of mind. But Tucker had no aversion to seeing himself as the one saneman in a wilderness of fools and scoundrels; he liked to recall how the greatBishop Butler, during an evening stroll in his garden at Bristol, had suggested tohim that a whole nation might go mad just as an individual might.16 Tucker wasa florid, abusive, and egocentric writer, in addition to being an extremely funnyone; we must remind ourselves that he is to be taken seriously. His reputationhas further suffered from the inadequate growth of the history of ideology as aserious scholarly discipline. Robert Livingston Schuyler once edited a selection ofTucker's writings from which the whole third book of the Treatise, which dealswith the history of medieval government, was omitted on the grounds that,being neither economics nor political theory, it could be of no possible interestto anybody.17 Now that we know a little more about how to write the history ofpolitical thought, there is much to be found in Tucker that is worth studyingboth as history and as theory.

The key to Tucker's mind must be found in the unity he effected between theneed for economic freedom and that for submission to civil authority. The firstof these principles convinced him (with David Hume)18 that those who made warfor commercial empire were wicked madmen, and (with Adam Smith)19 that tomaintain empire in order to regulate colonial economies was costly futility. Thesecond persuaded him (with both Hume and Smith)20 that if the Americanswould not submit to the authority of Parliament they should become separateand independent states - not indeed because they possessed any of the rights theywere claiming, which would soon lead them to declare their independence, butbecause they were a set of dangerous anarchs with whom Britain, for both com-mercial and civil reasons, should have as little as possible to do. Neither Humenor Smith was far from sharing the belief that independence was desirable, notas an American right but as a British convenience, and Hume agreed with Tuckerthat it would spike the guns of the potentially revolutionary agitators in Londonand Middlesex; but the dean of Gloucester proclaimed at the top of his voicewhat Smith knew was not politically practical to say before public opinion was

15 Johnson, Taxation no Tyranny (1775) in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. DonaldJ. Greene (New Haven, Conn., 1977), vol. X, Political Writings, p. 451.

16An Humble Address and Earnest Appeal . . . (Gloucester, 1775), p. 20n.17 Robert L. Schuyler, ed.,Josiah Tucker: A Selection from his Economic and Political Writings (New York,

1931).18". . . that wicked madman Pitt . . ." (Hume to Strahan, October 26, 1775); J. Y. T. Greig, ed.,

The Letters of David Hume 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932), vol. II, p. 301; see also pp. 303 -5 . Four Tractsand Two Sermons, pp. 7 5 - 8 8 .

19 An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, especially the concluding paragraphs.20Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 133-4, 190n.; Donald Winch,

Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiography Revision (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 146-63.


ready for it. In this respect, Tucker's personality was more eccentric than hisintellect, but it must be added that he believed in the need to cast off the Amer-icans for a formidable and fascinating collection of reasons. He took seriously, forexample - and why should he have been the only Englishman to do so? - Frank-lin's vision of a future in which the population of America would so far exceedthat of Britain that the seat of empire would be transferred across the Atlantic.Tucker returned again and again to this theme;21 it meant, he insisted, that thecontest with the colonies was a contest for empire,22 not liberty, and that allproposals for conciliation were part of an American strategy of remaining withinthe empire, without acknowledging its authority or contributing to its defense,until the time should come when they could take it over.23 For his part, he addedfor good measure, he would rather see Britain a French province than an Ameri-can one.24 Tucker never commented directly on the Declaration of Independence,but it would have been perfectly consistent (given the military situation of July1776) had he regarded it as a triumph for British arms; Yorktown he certainlyconsidered a fortunate defeat.25 Before dismissing Tucker as an overintelligentcrank with one idea, it might be well to ask ourselves what effect Franklin ex-pected his geopolitical prophecies to produce on the minds of Englishmen.

Tucker's reasons for wanting the Americans cast out of the British communityand obliged to assume the rank of independent states — enemies in war, inpeace friends26 - begin at a level of envenomed antipathy but become deeperand more interesting as we study them. In 1766, he gave a series of indignantaccounts of the American propensity for smuggling, for trading with the enemyin time of war, for trying to force British investors to accept colonial paper cur-rency in payment of debts;27 and these, as we have seen, were already linked witha vigorous response to Franklin's talk about a transfer of the seat of empire. Allthese grievances recur to the end of Tucker's writing career, and in his later worksthe specter of Franklin is merged with warnings against the colonies' encourage-ment of massive immigration from Britain and Ireland.28 But the tones deepen

2 1 A Letter from a Merchant, p p . 14, 4 2 - 3 , Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p p . x i i , 1 2 8 - 3 0 ; Humble

Address and Earnest Appeal. . . , p . 4 0 ; A Series of Answers, p p . xi—xii, 5 8 - 9 -22 A Letter from a Merchant, p . 4 2 {Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p p . 1 2 8 - 9 ) : " . . . you wan t to be

Independent: You wish to be an Empire by itself, and no longer the Province of another." HumbleAddress and Earnest Appeal, p . 41 : "His Majesty is graciously disposed to join with Great Britainagainst America in this Contest for Empire, (for in Fact, that is the real Dispute, whatever may bethe Pretence)."

23 A Series of Answers, pp. xi-xii , 5 8 - 9 ; Humble Address and Earnest Appeal; The Respective Pleas andArguments of the Mother Country and the Colonies . . . (Gloucester, 1775), p. vi.

24Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 194.25 Cui Bono? . . . Being a Series of Letters Addressed to Monsieur Necker (Gloucester, 1782), p. 140.26Humble Address and Earnest Appeal, p . 5: "Offering at the same Time, to enter into Alliances of

Friendship, and Treaties of Commerce with them, as with any other sovereign, independent States."27 A Letter from a Merchant (see also Four Tracts and Two Sermons); A Series of Answers, pp. 88-93-2 8 E.g . , Cui Bono? p . 26.


with A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq. of 1775. Here Tucker carries out a devastat-ing autopsy upon the great Speech on Conciliation, in which every one of Burke'sexplanations of the Americans' "fierce spirit of liberty" becomes a reason for hav-ing nothing more to do with them. He lingers with peculiar affection on thatadmittedly very odd passage in which Burke envisages the trans-Allegheny set-tlers' becoming a race of "English Tartars," a wild nomad cavalry raiding theoutposts of settled government.29 Even had British explorers yet encountered theComanche and Kiowa, the landscape of Ohio and Kentucky30 would hardly havejustified this application of the "shepherd-stage" theory then becoming estab-lished in French and Scottish historical sociology,31 and Tucker has some merci-less fun with Burke's premature invocation of the cowboy West.32 More seriousdisagreements, however, are soon to come. Burke's use of the argument frompopulation growth plays right into Tucker's hands, and his suggestion that thespirit of liberty in the southern colonies may be directly connected with theinstitution of slavery enables Tucker to open up an argument that will soonbecome a favorite: that if slaveholders are generally republicans, history showsthat republicans are generally slaveholders.33 We should note the following:

As to the Institution of Slavery in any of our Colonies; let them be Advocates for it, whoapprove of it. For my part, I am thoroughly convinced, that the Laws of Commerce, whenrightly understood, do perfectly coincide with the Laws of Morality; both originating fromthe same good Being, whose Mercies are over all his Works. Nay, I think it is demonstra-ble, that domestic or predial Slavery would be found, on a fair Calculation, to be the mostonerous and expensive Mode of cultivating Land, and of raising Produce, that could bedevised. And I defy you, with all your Learning and Acuteness, to produce a single In-stance from History either antient or modern, of a Country being well cultivated, and atthe same Time abounding in Manufactures, where this Species of Slavery (I mean the

29 "They would wander w i thou t a possibil i ty of restraint; they would change their manners wi th thehabi ts of their life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would becomeHordes of English Tartars ; and pour ing down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistiblecavalry, become masters of your Governors and your Counsellors, your collectors, and comptrol lers ,and of all the Slaves that adhered to them." Works (Rivington edition), vol. Ill, pp. 63-4.

30 Ib id . : "You cannot s tat ion garrisons in every par t of these deserts . If you drive the people from oneplace, they will carry on their annual Ti l lage , and remove wi th their flocks and herds to another. . . they behold before t h e m an immense pla in , one vast, r ich, level meadow; a square of fivehundred m i l e s . " Burke may mean tha t this regression to the shepherd stage is less the consequenceof the terrain than of the abdicat ion of a civil government that m i g h t otherwise p romote agricul-ture.

31 See R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1975); J. G. A. Pocock, "Gibbonand the Shepherds; The Stages of Society in the Decline and Fall," in History of European Ideas II, 3(1981), pp. 193-202.

32 A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq., Member of Parliament for the City of Bristol. . . in Answer to his PrintedSpeech . . . (Glouces te r , 1775) , p . 4 3 ; A Series of Answers, p p . 2 4 , 7 9 - 8 0 ; Humble Address and EarnestAppeal, p . 2 8 .

^Letter to Burke, p p . 2 2 - 3 ; A Series of Answers, p p . 2 2 , 1 0 3 - 6 .


domestic or predial) is preferred to the Method of hiring free Persons, and paying themWages.34

Tucker detested slavery, but this is no isolated explosion of his abhorrence. He

would soon be developing a highly specific theory in which the rise of a wage

economy goes with that of proper ideas concerning submission to civil authority,

and the prevalence of slave or serf labor is linked with an erroneous theory of

political liberty. Burke had enabled Tucker to accuse him of being on the latter

side; the same strategy could be employed, in a remarkable fashion, when he

dealt with Burke's suggestion that the northern colonists valued liberty because

their Puritan forebears had emigrated in search of liberty both religious and civil.35

Tucker's language shows how he was able to identify political radicalism with

degenerate Puritanism and to accuse Burke (of all people) of complicity with

both.

Our first Emigrants to North-America were mostly Enthusiasts of a particular Stamp. Theywere of that Set of Republicans, who believed, or pretended to believe, that Dominion wasfounded in Grace. Hence they conceived, that they had the best Right in the World, bothto tax, and to persecute the Ungodly. And they did both, as soon as they got Power intotheir Hands, in the most open and atrocious Manner.

In process of Time, the Notion, that Dominion was founded in Grace, grew out ofFashion. But the Colonists continued to be Republicans still, only Republicans of anotherComplection. They are now Mr. LOCKE s Disciples; who has laid down such Maxims inhis Treatise on government, that if they were to be executed according to the Letter, andin the Manner the Americans pretend to understand them, they would necessarily unhinge,and destroy every government upon Earth . . .

When the Emigrants fled from England, they were universally Calvinists of the mostinflexible Sort. But they were very far from being of that Species of Protestants, whomyou describe; and of which spreading Sect, there are but too many Proselites both in GreatBritain, Ireland, and America; I mean the modern new-light Men, who protest against everything, and who would dissent even from themselves, and from their own Opinions, if noother Means of Dissention could be found out. Such Protestants as these are very literallyPROTESTERS; but it is hard to say, what they are besides . . .

The present Dissenters in North America retain very little of the peculiar Tenets oftheir Forefathers, excepting their Antipathy to our established Religion, and their Zeal topull down all Orders in Church and State, if found to be superior to their own. And if itbe this you mean, by saying, that the dissenting Interests [in America} have sprung up indirect Opposition to all the ordinary Powers of the World; — and that the Religion mostprevalent in the Northern Colonies is a Refinement on the Principles of Resistance; the Dis-sidence of Dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant Religion:36 - In short, if you ascribethe fierce Spirit now raging in the Northern Colonies to these Causes, I make no Objection

34Utter to Burke. 35 Works, vol. Ill, p . 53.36Tucker is of course quoting a famous passage in Burke's speech.


to your Account of the Matter; provided you will allow, that the Religion of the Gospelis a very different Thing from theirs.37

This is not the last we shall hear of Tucker's belief that Locke's errors, orheresies, as a political theorist sprang from a confusion between the principles ofcivil and religious liberty. For the moment we are concerned with his onslaughtupon Burke, and here the first point to notice is that he would have had nodifficulty in accepting the contention of John Dunn and Quentin Skinner thatLocke's Treatises form "the classical text of radical Calvinist politics,"38 providedthe word "radical" was interpreted so as to fall in line with Alan Heimert'scontention that the American Revolution sprang from the soil of the Great Awak-ening.39 By "the modern new-light Men," Tucker meant those Dissenters, En-glish as well as American, for whom religion was now a kind of enthusiastic freeinquiry; who held, as he had put it in an Apology for the Present Church writtenthree years before, "that every Person, who was to teach, or preside in that As-sembly, should engage, to teach nothing but what appeared to him to be true, andagreeable to right Reason, (which Words you know are a parody on a favorite Expressionof yours relative to the Scriptures),"40 and that religion was a perpetual searchafter truth no more to be finally concluded than Sir Hudibras's reformation. Byinserting the words "in America" in square brackets in the last paragraph justquoted, Tucker probably meant to convey that English Dissent had gone overless completely to new-light rationalism than had the American congregations.41

We may still hold that he exaggerated the case; but in the Letter to Burke hecarefully excerpted the whole passage from the Speech on Conciliation in whichBurke had described "the Dissidence of Dissent" as justifiable "only on a strongclaim to natural liberty" and (with Tucker's emphasis added) as "agreeing in noth-ing but in the Communication of the Spirit ofLiberty."42 Here Tucker would see thereligious origins of Locke's political theory; he would also see, in Burke's account

37 Letter to Burke, p p . 1 8 - 2 0 . Tucker ' s pr in ter generally used square brackets , and these are repeatedin this essay.

38 Dunn, Political Thought of John Locke; Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols.(Cambr idge , 1978) , vol. I I , The Age of Reformation, p . 2 3 9 .

39 Alan E. H e i m e r t , Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the American Revolution(Cambr idge , Mass . , 1966).

40 An Apology for the Present Church of England as by Law Established, occasioned by a Petition . . . forAbolishing Subscriptions, in a Letter to one of the Petitioners (Gloucester, 1772), p p . 1 5 - 1 6 . T h e "you"addressed is not Burke this time.

41A Series of Answers, p. 69n.: "It is remarkable, that the younger Dissenters of all Denominations,both Clergy and Laity, are [I do not say Universally but] too generally tainted with levelling repub-lican principles respecting the State, and with various wild Heterodoxies in Point of Religion. TheElder, the more experienced, and those, who are in every respect the wiser, and better Part of themgreatly lament this general Defection in their Brethren." Tucker goes on to say that this does notapply to the Scots, against whom the patriots display violent prejudice. This passage might becompared with Burke's estimates of the extent of pro-French feeling among Dissenters after 1789.

42Letter to Burke, p. 17.


of the state of American Puritanism in 1775, a diagnosis identical with his own.As he tells Burke, not only at the end of the passage quoted, but throughout thedissection of the Speech on Conciliation, they do not differ on the facts, only on theconclusions to be drawn from them. All that Burke finds to make the Americansformidable, Tucker finds to make them abominable; every one of Burke's argu-ments for conciliation Tucker finds to be an argument for separation.

But if Burke, recognizing the true character of American society, still wantsto retain it in organic association with the established order in church and state,what is the explanation? Here Tucker's eye falls on the leading English apologistsfor American civil and religious liberty, and for colonial claims against the au-thority of parliament: Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. These "RepublicanDoctors"43 have reduced religion to a species of enthusiastic speculation; theyprofess what Tucker considers a "Lockian" political philosophy that denies thelegitimacy of all civil government by making consent its necessary precondition;they are the allies of those London radicals who, after joining with Pitt to pro-mote the great war for empire, are now using the crisis in imperial governmentto demand far-reaching political change and even new forms of political associa-tion. It is clear that Tucker in the 1770s found Dissenting claims for reform ongrounds of natural right and liberty deeply disturbing, exactly as Burke was todo a decade later; the words and actions of Richard Price helped spark Tucker'sTreatise Concerning Civil Government in 1781, just as they did Burke's Reflections onthe Revolution in France in 1790. But in 1775—6 Tucker found Burke expoundingPrice's brand of religion as a constituent of the American character, and Pricepraising Burke as a friend to liberty. Not even Tucker at his most explosive couldcall Burke a "Lockian"; but if the member for Bristol was not a republican, itseemed pretty clear to the dean of Gloucester that he was a "patriot," a self-serving politician who had joined with the republicans for reasons of his own.These reasons might be profoundly ambivalent and hypocritical. If in the Letterto Burke Tucker told him that "both the American and the English Republicansexpect great things from you,"44 in a tract of the following year he held Burkeresponsible for all plans involving a number of independent parliaments underthe same crown, which he said would inevitably lead to the despotism of either

43 ". . . your celebrated American Fellow Labourer . . ."; Letter to Burke, p. 12. The phrase "RepublicanDoctors" is in Four Letters on Important National Subjects Addressed to the Right Honourable the Earl ofShelburne (Gloucester, 1783), p. 23-

44Letter to Burke, pp. 14—15: "On the other hand, it is equally certain, that you are endeavouring tomake Use of these factious Republicans, as the Tools and Instruments of your own Advancement."In A Series of Answers, pp. xii-xiii, Tucker says that Burke was personally responsible for theDeclaratory Act and that Price lacks "the Ingenuity to acknowledge it." In A Treatise ConcerningCivil Government, p . 254, appears the figure of a false patriot who, rather than advocate a separationfrom the colonies, "would warmly recommend a Reform in the K—g's Kitchen, in his Cellar, inhis Household Servants, and his Household Furniture; - nay, I had almost said, in his Dog-Kennel." The allusion to Burke is obvious.


ministerial influence or royal prerogative, and probably to the triumph of Frank-lin's plan for the subjugation of Britain by America.43 These charges were not ascontradictory as may appear. When an eighteenth-century writer expresses fearof republicanism or democracy, he is usually expressing fear of a conspiracy bydegenerate aristocratic politicians, "desperate Catilinarian Men."46 By 1783 Tuckersaw the role of patrician demagogue being played by Lord Shelburne, that patronof subversive intellectuals (like Shaftesbury before him),47 who was supposed tohave said that monarchy might prove unnecessary. This fear was to be shared byBurke; we know that the Reflections were in part intended to expose the evildesigns of Shelburne and his creatures, Price and Priestley.48

Tucker's charges against Burke might not be acceptable, but they would notbe unintelligible to a contemporary mind; yet we can see the doctrinaire elementin them well enough. It seemed so clear that Britain should separate from thecolonies, and the case for doing so had been so cogently stated in Burke's ownoratory, that only sinister motives could account for his persistence in trying tokeep them within the empire; Common Sense, which Tucker attributed to Franklinand Adams (he does not say which Adams), was a refreshingly honest work bycomparison.49 What is striking and important for our purposes, however, is that,ten to fifteen years before the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Tucker couldmake so "Burkean" a case against ideologies with which he held Burke to be incomplicity. We return to the comparison between the two men's extended state-ments of the "conservative" position.

I l l

The name of John Locke does not occur in Burke's Reflections and, even where heis considering the proper interpretation of the events of 1688, it taxes the inge-nuity of modern scholars to contend that a rebuttal of the Treatises on Governmentwas what Burke had principally in mind. Tucker's Treatise Concerning Civil Gov-ernment is another matter. Since at least 1775, the dean of Gloucester had beenannouncing his intention of publishing a systematic refutation of Locke's theoryof politics at the earliest possible opportunity,50 and had given several foretastes

^Humble Address and Earnest Appeal, p p . 1 0 - 1 1 , 3 3 - 4 0 .46Treatise Concerning Civil Government, p . 238 . 4lFour Letters on Important National Subjects.48 Frederick Dreyer, "The Genesis of Burke's Reflections," Journal of Modem History L, 3 (1978), pp .

464-6.49 A Series of Answers, p . 50: "In this single Assertion, tho ' in very few others, I entirely agree with

the Authors . . . IT IS TIME T O P A R T . " See also p . 59.50Pleas and Arguments, p . 13n. This is also described as "Tract V , " in succession to Four Tracts and

Two Sermons, and the treatise against Locke was evidently intended to be a sixth. See Pleas andArguments, p p . 25ff., 3 8 - 9 - In the "Advertisement" prefixed to the Letter to Burke (pp. 1 1 - 1 3 ) ,Tucker says: "The present critical Juncture obliges the Author to postpone his Animadversions onMr. LOCKE's Theory of Government for some Time longer." See A Series of Answers, sig. A2 .


of his arguments. Significantly, the anti-Lockean treatise was originally to havetaken the form of an "address to the Protestant Dissenting ministers of NorthAmerica," but any intention of addressing American audiences had disappearedwith the increasing virulence of Tucker's feelings on the subject; and to judgefrom the four hundred pages it finally occupied, he had found composition abigger task than he had anticipated. A draft was privately printed for circulationamong the author's friends and predictably fell into hostile hands,51 but the textthat appeared in 1781 represented Tucker's final recension of his views.52

Tucker makes a somewhat simplistic statement of the position he desires torebut. Locke is taken to have said that the individual cannot be deprived of hisfreedom without his own consent; that he inherits no obligation to obey civilauthority from the fact of his father's obedience; that he cannot acquire member-ship in civil society from any period of living under its laws, without "actuallyentering into it by positive engagement"; and that he cannot be taxed or deprivedof his property without his consent.53 Tucker repeatedly cites the Second Treatisein support of this reading of Locke's intentions,54 but he is less concerned withthe structure of Locke's argument than with conclusions derived from and (in hisopinion) compatible with it, which he claims to find in Priestley's Essay on CivilGovernment,55 Price's Observations on Civil Liberty,56 and other works. 5 7 These con-

clusions are (a) that there may be conceived an ideal form of government, foundedon the individual's right to consent to the creation of authority and to acts oflegislation and taxation, in which he is as far as possible his own legislator inmatters concerning himself; (b) that governments obtaining in the actual worldare legitimate only insofar as they conform to this model, which most of them

51 Tucker included responses to criticisms already published by John Cartwright (The People's Barrieragainst Undue Influence and Corruption {London, 1780}) and J a m e s D u n b a r {Essays on the History of

Mankind {"London, 1781] ) . See Treatise, p p . 3 8 5 - 6 .5 2 T h e full t i t l e runs A Treatise Concerning Civil Government in three parts. Part I. The Notions of Mr.

Locke and his Followers concerning the Origin, Extent, and End of Civil Government, Examined and Con-

futed. Part II. The True Basis of Civil Government Set Forth and Ascertained; also Objections Answered;

Different Forms Compared; and Improvements Suggested. Part III. England's Former Gothic Constitution

Censured and Exposed; Cavils Refuted; and Authorities Produced; also the Scripture Doctrine Concerning the

Obedience Due to Governors Vindicated and Illustrated. By Jos iah Tucke r , D . D . , Dean of Glouces ter

(London, 1781).

^Letter to Burke, pp. 11—12, 12-13; A Series of Answers, pp. [ix}-x; Treatise, pp. 1-2, 3-5.54 Treatise, pp. 5-10. The citations are from Locke's Second Treatise, chap. VIII, sees. 95, 98, 116,

119-22; chap. IX, sees. 123, 127; chap. X, sees. 138, 140; chap. XVII, sec. 198.55 Treatise, pp. 13-17, citing "2nd ed., 1771," pp. 6, 11, 40. For citations see Pleas and Arguments,

pp. 38-9; Letter to Burke, pp. 12-13; A Series of Answers, pp. 60-4.56Treatise, pp. 18—21, citing "the 5th edition," pp. 1, 3, 4, 7, 15. For earlier citations see A Series

of Answers, pp. xii-xiv and (allusively) 60-74; also 88-93-57 Chiefly William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England (1698).

See Pleas and Arguments, pp. 25ff.; Treatise, pp. i-ii, 11-13, 96-101. Tucker attached muchimportance to proving Locke's complicity with Molyneux's writings, and argued incessantly for aparliamentary union with Ireland.


arc far from doing; and (c) that when a government is such that it defrauds ordeprives a people of its rights, they, or any individual acting in their name, arefree to take action designed to recover these rights and establish a governmentthat will actualize them. Tucker firmly asserts that Locke was the author andoriginator of these doctrines, but he is more concerned with the continuity anddevelopment of "Lockian" thought than with the exegesis and analysis of theTreatises of Government themselves. The problem he raises for us is less that ofLocke's own intentions than that of the role he played in the history of thoughtin the eighteenth century: Had it or had it not been radical in the way thatTucker supposes?

Tucker's central criticism of the "Lockian" position is one we have long beenaccustomed to consider essentially Burkean: namely, that a systematic applicationof a theory of natural right centering in the individual must end by delegitimat-ing all existing governments and all existing systems of institutionalized socialrelationships.58 Burke was to put it thus: "They have the rights of men. Againstthese there can be no prescription; against these no agreement is binding; theseadmit no temperament and no compromise; any thing withheld from their fulldemand is so much of fraud and injustice."59 As far back as 1775, Tucker hadfound a passage in Priestley that suggested that lawyers were not to be consultedwhen the requirements of nature were antecedent to any mere precedent of fact;60

and in 1781 he quoted Price as saying: "In general, to he free is to be guided byone's own Will, and to be guided by the Will of another is the Characteristic ofServitude. This is particularly applicable to Political Liberty."61 The questionwas, he wrote, whether any government was to be accounted usurpation thatcould not meet such criteria of natural right and freedom. Burke would haveconcurred (at least in 1790); the pages of the Reflections are thick with denuncia-tions of the "metaphysician," whose wickedness knows no bounds because he willsubject any human relation or affection to abstract criteria such as natural right,and as often as not this "metaphysician" is a figure constructed from that ofRichard Price himself. A decade and more earlier, Tucker had found Price guiltyof the same errors, but his imagination was coarser and less apocalyptic thanBurke's, and the "metaphysician," instead of being an embodiment of Luciferian

58Letter to Burke, p. 12: Priestley teaches that "as all Governments whatever have been in someMeasure compulsory, tyrannical and oppressive in their Origin, THEREFORE they ought to bechanged"; Rousseau suggests doing this annually. A Series of Answers, p. 64. Treatise, p. 4: "TheQuestion, therefore, the sole Question now to be decided, is simply this, 'Whether THAT Govern-ment is to be justly deemed an USURPATION, which is not founded on the express mutual Com-pact of all the Parties interested in, or belonging thereunto?' "; p. 17 (summarizing Priestley):"And in Circumstances, where regular Commissions from this abused Public cannot be had, EVERYMAN, who has Power, and who is actuated with the Sentiments of the Public, may assume a publicCharacter, and bravely redress public Wrong."

59Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: Works, vol. II, p . 60.60 Pleas and Arguments, pp. 38-39 and note. 61Treatise, p . 20.


pride and hypocrisy, is simply a figure of the contemporary scene - the heir ofLocke, the expositor of a socially dangerous error which Tucker proceeds to ex-plain.

The error is that of making the individual, his rights, and his personality,anterior to the formation of civil society. Tucker presents this error as arising intwo ways. In the first place, it is predicated on a fundamentally antisocial viewof human nature. The naturally free individual is by nature free, and very littlemore; he desires to be free and to rule himself, he asserts a series of rights to thesatisfaction of these desires, but he and those like him are by nature no more thanso many "independent and unconnected" beings (the words are Priestley's), who

do not spontaneously, and, as it were, imperceptibly slide into a Distinction of Orders, anda Difference of Ranks by living and conversing together, as Neighbours and social Beings:— But on the contrary . . . naturally shew an Aversion, and a Repugnance to every kindof Subordination, 'till dire Necessity compells them to enter into a solemn Compact, andto join their Forces together for the Sake of Self-Preservation.62

It may be worth remarking at this point that Tucker shows no particularinterest in Hobbes and does not find it necessary to invoke his specter as part ofan indictment of natural-rights social theory. He is asserting that men are natu-rally sociable, that they naturally learn to accept differences of rank and authorityas part of the experience of social life, and that government and submission toauthority arise naturally out of the network of relationships and subordinationsthus formed. By comparison, such an author as Priestley

supposes Government, to be so entirely the work of Art, that Nature had no Share at allin forming it; or rather in predisposing and inclining Man to form it. The Instincts of Nature,it seems, had nothing to do in such a complicated Business of Chicane and Artifice, whereevery Man was for driving the best Bargain he could; and where all in general, both thefuture governors and governed, were to be on the catch as much as possible . . . In short,they did not feel any Instincts within themselves kindly leading them towards associating,or incorporating with each other.63

Here are Burke's "sophisters, oeconomists and calculators";64 but they do notoccur where Burke seems to place them, at the moment of transition from afeudal and chivalric to a commercial and philosophical society, but rather at themoment of Lockean compact, where we are to imagine society as being formedby a multitude of "independent and unconnected" beings. Tucker hammers awayat the unhistorical character of such a compact, because he wants to emphasizethat we cannot imagine it without imagining the individual out of history, andconsequently out of nature. The state of nature is profoundly unnatural. It is clearto him how this error has arisen.

62Treatise, p. 22. ^Treatise, pp. 2 3 - 4 . "Reflections; Works, vol. II, p. 89-


But if Mr. LOCKE and his Followers have not granted much to human Nature in oneRespect, they have resolved to make abundant Amends for their Deficiency in another.For tho' they have not allowed human Nature to have any innate Propensities towards thefirst Formation of civil Society; - yet they do most strenuously insist, that every Man,every individual of the human Species hath an unalienable Right to chuse, or refuse,whether he will be a member of this, or that particular Government, or of none at all.65

As unequivocally as could be desired by any modern follower of Leo Strauss orRussell Kirk, Tucker identifies the "Lockian" error as the divorce of the individualfrom society brought about by the substitution of natural right for natural law.It is not by accident that the penultimate chapter of his Treatise is designed torescue "the judicious Hooker" from the republican and individualist company hehas too long been obliged to keep,66 and restore him to his proper place in thesuccession from Aristotle and Cicero to Grotius, as "a Constitutional (though nota Republican) Whigg."61 Here we may be tempted to assign Tucker, as he assignsHooker, to the grand "classical tradition of natural law," to which Burke too isheld to have addressed himself when he protested against the "sophisters, oec-onomists and calculators." But Tucker's role as a pioneer of free-trade economicsmay perplex us here, since we have been for so long encouraged to see the decom-position of classical politics in the eighteenth century as brought about by therise of classical economics — as an affair of the revolt of economy against polity,68

of the rise of possessive individualism69 and market ideology.70 Tucker is so farfrom fitting into this scenario that he presents a problem worth exploring. Weshould begin by noting the second explanation he offers of the rise of natural-right theory, one that entails a rather different account of its history. In a rela-tively benign account of Locke's historical role, he writes:

Mr. LOCKE in his early Days was a Witness to grievous Persecutions inflicted on theScore of Religion. He saw the Right to private judgment exposed to continual Vexations;and he saw likewise, that the Interests of the State were not at all concerned in maintainingthat rigid universal Conformity in Religion, for which the Bigots of those Times so fiercelycontended; - nay, that the Principles of Humanity, justice, and Truth, as well as theSuggestions of sound Policy, plainly required a more extended Plan of religious Liberty:All this he clearly saw: And hence he inferred, and very justly, that every Man had a Rightnot only to think, but even to act for himself, in all such religious Matters as did notoppose, or clash with the Interests of civil Society. And had he stopt there, and gone nofurther, all would have been right; nay, he would truly have deserved the Thanks ofMankind for pleading their Cause so well.

^Treatise, p. 25. ^Treatise, Part II, p. Hi. 6lTreatise, p. 409.68 Joseph E. Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague,

1957).6 9 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962).70Joyce O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.,

1978).


But alas! he extended those ideas, which were true only in what concerns Religion, toMatters of a mere civil Nature, and even to the Origin of civil Government itself, — as ifthere had been the same Plea for Liberty of Conscience in disobeying the civil Laws ofone's Country, as for not conforming to a Church Establishment, or an EcclesiasticalInstitution; — and that the Rights of private judgment [I mean the open and publicExercise of those Rights} are equally unalienable and indefeasible in both Respects.71

Tucker was what he had called Hooker, a constitutional Whig: a resolutedefender of toleration, a resolute opponent of the Dissenting claim that civilrights should be accessible to all on grounds unconnected with church member-ship. What seemed to be a separation of church and state, he held, was in feet aconfusion between the two, namely, the error of holding that civil liberty couldbe claimed on the same grounds as religious liberty; and this was an error towhich Dissent, for theological reasons as well as in consequence of its civil posi-tion, was especially prone. We have noted Tucker's suggestion that New Eng-landers had passed from believing that dominion was founded in grace to believ-ing that religious liberty was a civil and natural right. There is something to thesame effect in a highly entertaining passage of the Treatise where he imagines hisopponents objecting that though natural society may grow imperceptibly throughthe processes of human interaction, civil or political society is different in kindand cannot come into being without specific acts of consent and engagement byindividuals. Tucker imagines his reply:

When Mr LOCKE was a very young Man, it was the Custom of the Pastors of his Timeto make the junior Part of their Congregations to undergo the following strange Exami-nation, "At what Day or Hour did you feel the Influxes of Saving Grace, and receive theSeal of your Election and Justification?" Something like the same Question is couchedunder this Objection, founded under Mr LOCKE's System.72

The acts of divine grace — however much the Puritans distorted their opera-tions - may well occur and take effect outside the normal processes of socialexperience and education; but to suppose that the political acts of free individualscan only be thought of as acts of consent rooted immediately in nature is an errorthat may very well arise from a confusion between grace and dominion. The resultis not only that we separate the political institution from

that progressive Course of Civil Society, which like the infant State of Man {moral andintellectual as well as natural) grows up gradually from small beginnings to Maturity . . .As well may you pretend to define, where the Night ends, and the Day begins, as toassign the exact Period when that Society which is natural puts on the Dress and assumesthe Form of the Political.73

It is also that we confound the actions of the moral being with those of thepolitical. By this Tucker does not of course mean that political actions are inde-llTreastise, pp. 3 0 - 1 . 12Treatise, p. 153. ^ Treatise, p. 158.


pendent of moral constraints; he means that moral personality is not by itself asufficient foundation for political capacity and membership. It is the fundamental"Lockian" error to suppose that it is; for not only does this mean that an equalpolitical role must be accorded to every moral agent - every sentient humancreature, rich and poor, male and female, young and old74 - but in the lastanalysis it makes political action and capacity impossible. The reason is thatmoral action is not alienable, whereas political action is:

In the Affairs of Conscience no Man can act, or be supposed to act as Proxy for another;no Man can be a Deputy, Substitute or Representative in such a Case; but every Man mustthink, and act personally for himself. This is the Fact; and in this Sense it is very true,that the Rights of private Judgement are absolutely unalienable . . . because they areuntransferable.15

But all systems of political action, all distributions of civil authority amonghuman beings, depend upon my capacity to recognize that another has the rightto act for me and the authority to commit me by his actions. To say that all myactions must be performed by me as a moral agent not only denies another theauthority to command me; it also denies me the authority to commission anotherto act in my name; for if my rights are unalienable I am not free to alienate them.To identify political capacity with moral agency therefore destroys both authorityand representation at a single blow.

Honest, undissembling ROUSSEAU clearly saw, where the Lockian Hypothesis mustnecessarily end. And as he was a Man who never boggled at Consequences, however ex-travagant or absurd, he declared with his usual Frankness, that the People could nottransfer their indefeasible Rights of voting for themselves to any others: and that the veryNotion of their choosing Persons to represent them in these Respects, was a species ofContradiction. According to him, a Transmutation of Persons could not be a greaterimpossibility than a Translation of those Rights, which are absolutely incommunicable.76

Rousseau is the Priestley of Geneva, the dissidence of dissent in its alpineform. Both theorists leave the individual "independent and unconnected," claim-ing to choose a government for himself but in fact incapable of doing so without"chicane" and "contradiction." Tucker does not examine Rousseau's solution of

74 Treatise, pp. 26—7: "Now, according to the Principles of Mr. LOCKE and his Followers . . . theRight of voting is not annexed to Land, or Franchises, to Condition, Age, or Sex; but to humanNature itself, and to moral Agency: Therefore, wherever human Nature, and moral Agency do existtogether, be the Subject rich or poor, old or young, male or female, it must follow from thesePrinciples, that the Right of voting must exist with it: For whosoever is a moral Agent is a Person;and Personality is the only Foundation of the Right of voting." Tucker frequently hints that womenwould have the right to vote on these principles. He does not seem to think that they should,though he notes {Treatise, p. 249n.) that women shareholders vote in elections of East India Com-pany directors; his point is not that women are not moral persons, but that moral personality confersno right to vote. See his debate with Cartwright on the subject; Treatise, pp. 358-65.

75 Treatise, pp. 32-33; cf. p. 2In. 76Treatise, p . 39.


the problem, but if he had we may imagine him commenting acidly on theradical separation between the general will and any scheme of social relations onwhich human beings could be supposed to enter as the result of their own activ-ities. He now returns to these relations as he claims they really are, and considersthem as naturally engendering authority and political capacity, subordinationand right.

IV

There is no distinction between natural and political authority, because the latterarises as humans, in the ordinary course of social interaction, recognize that ine-qualities of capacity exist among them and acknowledge the authority for specificpurposes of those possessing superiority in the capacity for which each purposecalls.77 Natural society is therefore deferential, and the state is the consolidationof those groups of authoritative persons to whom deference is paid. This does notmean that it is a simple aristocracy; Tucker is a good enough Aristotelian to beaware that authority comes in many forms and is lodged in many groups ofpersons, who need not cohere in a single governing class or institution. Consis-tently throughout his writings he affirms the superiority of a mixed constitutionor state;78 but this does not exist chiefly to ensure the internal restraints whichits component parts exert upon each other, and Tucker has no objection to sayingthat "we must stop somewhere"79 and attribute to some governing organ a finalauthority from which there is no appeal — the ne plus ultra that every parliamen-tarian found he must sooner or later assert and defend against American claims.The value of a mixed-constitution doctrine is that it appropriately expresses theidea that political authority is the coalescence of various forms of natural author-ity and is thus natural itself. There is nothing particularly architectonic aboutthe political art; deference and authority are products of the natural sociability ofhuman creatures pursuing their diverse activities and associations. Tucker wouldnot satisfy any believer in the primacy of political philosophy as a ruling art, butthen he was a Christian priest and not a pagan Platonist.

This natural society, in which people conduct their own activities and findtheir own heads of association, might remind Socrates of the ''city of pigs," andit may if we are not careful remind us of Locke's state of nature. It is of coursethe antithesis of the latter, because it contains everything necessary to the consti-tution of civil government, without recourse to compact, contract, or consent.Tucker lays great emphasis on the civil-law notion of a "quasi-contract,"80 in

^Treatise, pp. 130—5; p. 134: ". . . there is found to exist in human Nature a certain ascendancyin some, and a kind of submissive Acquiescence in others."

™ Treatise, pp. 207, 242; Four Letters to Shelburne, pp. 100-1 . 79Pleas and Arguments, p. 12.80 Treatise, pp. 139-43.


which contractual relations and rights may be presumed to exist though no for-mal agreement to enter upon them has ever been signed; they exist because socialrelationships are found to have progressed to that degree of complexity and so-phistication, and there is no need to posit the individual and his natural freedomas anterior to their formation. But we might still suppose that the "natural soci-ety" entails no more than a "natural economy": that relatively simple state ofappropriation of the earth and cultivation of its fruits, which in Locke's systemprecedes the growth of monetarized exchange and the consequent need of morecomplex forms of government. Noting that Tucker has nothing whatever to sayabout this aspect of Locke's theory, an exponent of the view that Locke is thetheorist of commercial society might wish to argue that Tucker misunderstoodthe nature of his doctrine, exaggerated the distinction between contract and quasi-contract, and allowed the apparently unhistorical character of Locke's individu-alism to mislead him — as perhaps it misled Priestley, Price, and Paine — as tothe width of the gap separating Locke's thought from his own. Such an exponentmight question whether Locke was the radical egalitarian and natural-rights in-dividualist Tucker took him to have been.

Nothing, however, could be more inaccurate than to take Tucker to have beencontent with a simple "natural economy," and we cannot understand the char-acter of his polemic against Locke until we understand the character of the debateover political economy in England and Scotland since Locke's time. During thelast years of the latter's career, and with some assistance from him,81 there hadcome into being a new system of public finance, based on the Bank of Englandand the national debt, which involved the growth of a new class of public credi-tors and the ability of the state to maintain its political and military enterprisesby anticipating its revenues. This system had proved so stimulating to economicas well as political growth that the phrase "a commercial society" had come todenote not merely one engaged in trade and commerce, but one maintained bythe system of public credit and capital flow that was now seen as essential tocommerce in the ordinary sense. But the Whig political regime that credit sup-ported had been created fairly rapidly and to the exclusion of many previouslyentrenched political groups, and the publicists of the eighteenth century engagedin a perpetual and bitter debate over the merits of its existence.82 Its opponents,

81 Locke was active in the Great Recoinage and one of the first shareholders in the Bank of England.82There is now a sizable literature on this debate. See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Com-

monwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle; J . G. A. Pocock,Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971); and The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J . ,1975); John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977);H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in ISth-Century Britain (London, 1977);Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y. , 1978); DrewMcCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeff ersonian America (Chapel Hill, N .C . , 1980);Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue (Cambridge, 1983).


variously known by such epithets as "country," "Commonwealth," and "patriot"ideologues, included dissatisfied elements of both rural gentry with Tory ante-cedents and urban merchants and artisans with Dissenting connections and radi-cal leanings; and this accounts for the widespread belief (which Tucker vigorouslyshared) that Tory and patriot, Jacobite and republican, were closely allied and attimes virtually interchangeable.83

The ideology of opposition was moral and neoclassicist in its arguments andassumptions, and had little if anything to do with the debate between Locke andFilmer. To the image of the individual as client, dependent and corrupt, it op-posed that of the individual as citizen, independent and virtuous. It located thisimage first, in classical antiquity, when the oikos had served to support the pollsand the ager the quirts, and second, in a simplified and idealized version of me-dieval society, when the "Gothic" freeholder had been at one and the same timehis own warrior, judge, and legislator. This was less an idealization of feudalismthan a defeudalization of medieval reality,84 and it is important to bear in mindthat the economy invoked to assail the growth of public credit represented, inMarxist terms, the ancient rather than the feudal stage of production. But thedefenders of the new order85 saw from an early time that what they were requiredto vindicate was a rentier society in which the individual found it worth his whileto pay others, and to invest his money in the system by which they were paid, toconduct a professionalized system of government that left him free to pursue hisprofit, leisure, and cultivation. If the Goths, Spartans, and early Romans hadbeen free and virtuous, they had been neither enlightened nor polite; and it cameto be argued that neither material freedom nor intellectual development had beenpossible in ancient economies, where the warrior-citizen had been obliged todischarge all functions in his own person, instead of paying others to dischargesome of them for him.86 In such an economy, moreover, the dearth of monetar-ized exchange relationships meant that the performance of personal services in-evitably became a principal means of receiving a benefit or paying a debt.87 Theancient city rested on a foundation of slavery, the Gothic polity on one of serf

83 A Series of Answers, p . 9 3 : " B u t the patr iot ic Dean S W I F T had almost raised a Rebell ion in Irelandunder the l ike shameful Pretence, wi th tha t which is now mainta ined by the patr iot ic Dr . P R I C E ,viz. T h a t Copper Money and Paper Money will drain us of our Gold and Silver . . . And thus itappears b u t too plainly, tha t Mock-Patriots in every Count ry , in every Age , and of every D e n o m i -nat ion , are m u c h the same"; p p . 9 4 n . - 9 5 : "And I have had the Mortification to find, tha t not afew of those , who formerly wore all the Insignia, and drank all the Healths of Jacob i t i sm, now giveas evident Proofs of their be ing Repub l i cans . " See also Thomas R. Cleary, "Henry Fielding and theGrea t Jacobi te Paper W a r of 1 7 4 7 - 4 9 , " Eighteenth-Century Life 5 , 1 (1978) , p p . 1 - 1 1 .

84 D . W . L. Earl , "Procrustean Feudalism: An Interpretat ive Dialogue in English Historical Narra-tion, 1700-1725," Historical Journal XIX, 1 (1976), pp. 33-52.

85 O f w h o m the leader was Danie l Defoe; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p p . 4 3 2 - 6 , 4 5 2 - 8 .8 6 M e l v i n R ich te r , The Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambr idge , 1977) , presents Montesqu ieu ' s

treatment of this question.81'Treatise, p. 51.


labor. It was, then, as a means of defending rentier and "commercial" societyagainst criticism in the name of the classical citizen ideal that the idea came tobe generally put forward that personal liberty and intellectual progress dependedon the increase and development of exchange relationships, and these in turn onthe progressive increase of specialization of function and division of labor.88

In the growth of this debate, and the very important role it played in thehistory of political economy, Locke took no direct part. He appears to have beentotally indifferent to the clash of ideas about ancient virtue and modern com-merce, and though it is possible to imagine how his accounts of the origins ofgovernment might have been fitted into the defense of modernity, there is re-markably little sign of its being used in its construction. Lockean ideas about therole of labor in the appropriation of property, and more important, his ideasabout the role of epistemology in the formation of personality, may have beenextensively drawn upon by the Scottish philosophers as they formulated a theoryof human progress in which labor became increasingly specialized and the humancapacities for passion, production, and the organization of ideas increasingly com-plex and sophisticated.89 But in the present state of research it is not at all clearwhether or how this happened; we have for so long taken it for granted that theintellectual history of the eighteenth century is to be organized around the figureof Locke that we do not in fact know how to do so. Josiah Tucker, who was akeen student of the growth of the Scottish school,90 a vigorous exponent of polit-ical and economic modernism, and a man of strong opinions about the history ofpolitical thought over the preceding hundred years,91 was able to assume thatLocke had played a wholly reactionary role and could be denounced as an expo-nent of archaic politics.

Tucker's refutation of "Lockian" politics contains many arguments directed atan ideal of classical citizenship that Locke himself had never affirmed. He con-tends that republican Rome was not a virtuous but an economically primitivepolity, in which the constant demands of military service forced the citizen toneglect his smallholding and go into debt, thus preparing the way for his subse-quent corruption.92 It would have been better had he employed his industry in

8 8The classics here are John Millar, The Origin of Ranks (1771, 1787), and Adam Smith, The Wealthof Nations (1776). For Tucker, see Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 25; Treatise, pp. 130—1.

89 For recent studies of the growth of this interpretation, see David Kettler, The Social and PoliticalThought of Adam Ferguson (Columbus, Ohio, 1965); Duncan Forbes, ed., Adam Ferguson's Essay onthe History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1966); Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics; Meek, Social Scienceand the Ignoble Savage; Winch, Adam Smith's Politics; Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests;Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue; and chap. 6, this volume.

90Tucker corresponded with Kames, debated with Hume, and read Robertson. Cf. Treatise, p . 376.91 Tucker held that Filmer and Locke had fallen into the same error of making a right to rule anterior

to the being of government, and differed only as to its location. Treatise, pp. 8 1 - 8 , 4 2 7 - 8 ; FourLetters to Shelburne, pp. 9 7 - 8 .

92Four Tracts and Two Sermons, pp. 6 0 - 5 ; Treatise, pp. 226ff.


increasing the yield of his farm; but Tucker quotes Cicero on the ignobility of allmechanical and useful arts.93 The ancient republics all possessed governmentsprofoundly unsuited to the encouragement of commercial society,94 and the Gothicpolities after them can only be compared to the slave-worked Jamaican and Vir-ginian estates owned by such patriots as Beckford and Washington.95 Tuckergleefully declares that Locke was the author of the Fundamental Constitutions ofCarolina and as such - like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and other modern repub-licans - an apologist for slavery; he knows the answer to Dr. Johnson's question,"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of ne-groes?"96 From his point of view it does not matter that the rhetoric of Romanvirtue and independence is singularly absent from Locke's writings. In the rhet-oric of Americans, Dissenters, and Londoners Tucker finds the two converging;there is a union between the classical ideal of the citizen (merged with the Gothicideal of the freeholder) who commands his own lands and arms, so that he can beinvolved in government only in his own person, and the "Lockian" ideal of theindividual whose rights to personality and property are anterior to the being ofcivil society, so that he can be brought under government only by his own con-sent. Tucker does not bother to distinguish between the two, rooted though thedistinction may be in that between virtue and right, because he sees both asequally archaic. Such a precivil command of property is possible only in a pre-commercial world of slaveholding latifundists or serf-commanding barons. In thelast of his published works, a group of open letters to Shelburne, Tucker linksLocke with Algernon Sidney as nostalgic for "Polish liberty"; both were ideo-logues for a group of desperate aristocratic radicals, the Catilines of their age.97

The dreadful truth that Russell and Sidney had taken French money was longsince out,98 and Tucker did not scruple to hint that the patriots of the Americanwar had done the same.99

He would clearly have had difficulty in recognizing Locke as a "bourgeoisideologist," whatever that terminological inexactitude may imply. Tucker em-ploys a basically Scottish theory of the progress of commercial society as a meansof destroying the positions he attributed to Locke, Price, and Priestley, by affirm-ing the priority of natural law over natural right. He was able to do this becausehe believed that natural society was commercial society, and that commerce wasa natural human activity. It seems to have been said of him by Bishop Warburton

93 Treatise, pp. 2 2 6 - 3 0 . 94 Treatise, p. 202 (chapter heading).95Series of Answers, p. 106; Treatise, pp. 168, 2 1 8 - 2 2 4 . Comparisons between Gothic barons and

modern planters are found in Treatise, pp. 167, 210 , 302.96 A Series of Answers, pp. 1 0 3 - 6 ; Treatise, pp. 1 6 7 - 8 ; Four Letters to Shelburne, pp. 9 2 - 4 . For John-

son, see Taxation No Tyranny, in Works, ed. Greene, p. 454 .97 Four Letters to Shelburne, letter IV.98 Sir John Dalrymple's Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland had been published in 1771."Cut Bono? p . 12.


that "he made religion a trade, and trade a religion;"100 and though he displayedindignation at this piece of rather brutal perspicuity,101 he did not conceal hisbelief that exchange relations between men were part of the providential plan forgovernment of the universe, They came into being as humans discovered thediversity of their situations and capacities,

a great Difference of Talents; and, if I may be allowed the Expression, a wonderful Varietyof Strata in the human Mind,102

and set up relations among themselves by exchanging the goods and services eachwas best fitted to provide. Though commercial progress tended to the dissolutionof hereditary authority, it was in the practice of exchange that men learned toidentify and respect their betters, and Tucker saw nothing in commerce incom-patible with deference;103 on the contrary, it was only through the cementing ofthese natural relations between men that government could come into being,without the "chicanery" and "contradiction" inherent in the idea of a compactbetween "independent and unconnected" individuals. Exchange among humanswas a natural, providential, and divine necessity.

And how are the Ends both of Religion and Government to be answered, but by theSystem of universal Commerce? - Commerce, I mean, in the large and extensive Signifi-cation of that Word; Commerce, as it implies a general System for the useful Employmentof our Time; as it exercises the particular Genius and Abilities of Mankind in some Wayor other, either of Body or Mind, in mental or corporeal Labour, and so as to make Self-interest and Social coincide. And in pursuing this Plan, it answers all the great Ends bothof Religion and Government; it creates Social Relations, it enables Men to discharge theirDuty in those Relations, and it serves as a Cement to connect together the Religious andCivil Interests of Mankind.104

But what is natural is also historical; Tucker's economy moves through a seriesof stages of development and attains greater fulfillment as it becomes more mod-ern. There is consequently no such thing as a state of nature, conceived as a normof departure; Tucker devotes no less than thirty pages of the Treatise ConcerningCivil Government10"* to repudiating the thesis that the American Indians displaysociety in its natural condition. Here he bases himself wholly on William Rob-ertson's History of America, a classic of Scottish four-stages theory in which it is

100Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 164-5. wlFour Tracts and Two Sermons, p. xiv.™2 Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 67. l0iTreatise, pp. 41, 124, 126, 130-1, 159-60.104Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 11.105 Pp. 170-201. Robertson's America had been published in 1777. See The Works of William Robert-

son, D.D. (London, 1824), vols. VI and VII.


said of the Indians (as Gibbon had written of the primitive Germans)106 thatbecause they do not labor, they neither appropriate nor produce and consequentlyhave never developed their passions past a level of gloomy frigidity, to the pointwhere the exchange of commodities makes possible the beginnings of sympathyand sociability. When Tucker wrote that commerce "creates social relations," hemeant to be taken literally. He was no less clear that the beginnings of appro-priation marked the beginnings of dispute over property and of the need for civilgovernment; he quoted, ironically but by no means dismissively, the famouspassage from the Discours sur lorigine de I'inegalite in which Rousseau prophesiesthe fatal consequences flowing from the first man's erection of a fence around landhe calls his own.107 That Rousseau thought this the true fall of man does nottrouble Tucker unduly; it is an event occurring naturally in the process of prim-itive economics, and is not preceded by the construction of a fictitious scheme ofrights.

If there is no state of nature, there is no "Machiavellian moment." We havealready considered Tucker's refutation of the theory that early Rome or Spartacould be considered an era of civic virtue, with citizen-warriors commandingtheir own land and participating in their own government. Exchange relationshad not yet developed to the point where the yeoman could be kept from sinkinginto debt, or the wealthy from commanding the labors of countless slaves; theancient patrician, like the feudal baron, belonged to an era when the performanceof personal service to a patron had not yet been replaced by the receipt of wagesfor one's industry or a price for one's produce, out of which a tax could be paidfor the support of civil government. If no Machiavellian moment, then no "an-cient constitution." Most of the third book of the Treatise Concerning Civil Govern-ment is spent in demolishing the myth of Gothic liberty, on which the patriots of1781 still heavily relied. Locke had written nothing on this subject, and we donot even know if he meant to communicate his indifference to others; but it wasprominent in that convergence of "patriot" with "Lockian" rhetoric with whichTucker supposed himself to be dealing.

What Tucker has to say here is in part a replay of a debate fifty years old, andof another fifty years older still. He was a keen admirer of Sir Robert Walpole,whom he saw as the first minister in history to have understood the principles oftaxation and the proper government of a commercial society;108 and in the paperwar against Bolingbroke and the Craftsman about 1730, Walpole's journalistshad helped defeat the country appeal to the "original principles" of the consti-tution by arguing that liberty in England was modern, not ancient, and that

106Decline andFall, chap. 9; see J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume; Gibbon as CivicHumanist and Philosophic Historian," in Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire, ed. G. W. Bowersock and John Clive (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

101'Treatise, pp. 4 6 - 7 . 108Four Tracts and Two Sermons, p. 7In. ; Treatise, pp. 78, 222n., 242 -3 .


constitutional government had emerged out of feudal disorder.109 To make thiscase they had drawn upon the arguments of Robert Brady and the Tory historiansof 1680 and after, who had been involved in the defense of one part of Filmer'swritings when Locke was attacking the other.110 This adoption of RestorationTory arguments by Hanoverian Whigs to defend themselves against Common-wealth Whigs and their country Tory allies is, of course, a crucial and confusingmove in the development of eighteenth-century polemics.111 A hundred yearsafter Brady, fifty years after Walpole, and twenty years after Hume (whose Historyhe does not seem to cite), Tucker carries on the strategy; but he does so in acontext transformed by the growth of Scottish historical sociology and a growingdebate over the role of boroughs in the historical structure of English parliamen-tary government.

Before the growth of commerce, society could at most be feudal, and in anEngland of lords and serfs — vassals, copyholders, and villeins — Parliament inits modern sense could have no place. To understand the history of that institu-tion, it was necessary to understand the history of the House of Commons, andsince this assembly brought together the representatives of shires and boroughs,it was necessary to decide whether its history was to be written in terms of theincreasing role of country gentry or of urban burgesses. The Scottish historians,Robertson among them, were advancing the generalization that "the progress ofsociety in Europe" was due to the increasing commercial activity of the tradinginhabitants of corporate towns112 — the bourgeoisie in the institutional sense of theterm, for which, significantly, no equivalent exists in English.113 Tucker has noobjection to this proposition in general, but as part of the patriot radicalism hehad devoted himself to confuting, he was confronted by a demand for parliamen-tary reform which reiterated the allegation that the representation of boroughswas ancient and immemorial and could be traced to a time when they wereindependent and free before falling under royal and aristocratic influence. Tuckersaw this argument not as expressing the claims of a rising class of burgesses, butas serving the interests of a miscellaneous political class of patriots, dissenters,and demagogues populating the great wen of London, Westminster, and South-wark,114 whose influence had increased, was increasing, and ought to be dimin-

109See n. 6, this chapter; also Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, pp. 233-49, 482-3. A good textis Lord Hervey's Ancient and Modern Liberty Stated and Compared (London, 1734).

110J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957).mKenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 200-8.112 Robertson, Works, vol. Ill, pp. 9-316, "The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V,

with a View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to theBeginning of the Sixteenth Century."

113Bourg; bourgeois; bourgeois (adj.); bourgeoisie. Burg, Burger; burgerlich; Burgertum. Borough; burgess;no adjective; no collective or abstract noun. This exercise in historical semantics suggests furtherreflections.

n4Treatise, pp. 258-60, 274, 291-2.


ished. Their rhetoric could at every point be confuted by advancing the thesisthat commerce was the natural human state and that society progressed naturallyfrom relations of personal service, dependence, and servitude to relations of in-dependent association, voluntary deference, and monetarized exchange; but itwas a central feature of this argument that trading towns had come late on thescene of history and could claim neither ancient nor natural right. As generallyhappened in the eighteenth century, the commercial interpretation of history wasan argument in defense of the established Whig order, and to argue whetherTucker or his opponent (who in this case might be Cartwright) is the "bourgeoisideologist" is merely to play games with a double-headed penny.

Tucker accordingly depicts a process (based largely on the works of Brady andMadox in earlier generations)115 in which the medieval boroughs, grudginglyfounded by feudal lords in minimal recognition of the need for some division oflabor, grew in importance during the period of "epidemical Madness" that seizedon the unemployed warriors of Europe during the Crusades and were summonedto send representatives to the king's councils.116 But far from eagerly pressingthe demand for annual parliaments beloved of eighteenth-century radicals, theyattended with the utmost reluctance and departed as soon as they could. For thisTucker assigns an interesting reason, in which the political behavior of baronsand burgesses appears the reverse of what is sometimes portrayed.

The Fact was, to speak the Truth at once, the landed Interest, as it was then erroneouslyunderstood, was supposed to be directly opposite to the trading Interest of the Kingdom.For the personal and immediate Interest of the Barons, great and small, was to preservetheir own Importance in the State, and their Authority and Jurisdiction over their Vassalsand Dependents, in Contradistinction to the regal Power. Whereas Shopkeepers, Traders,and Mechanics, could have no such Views. Therefore the former were always desirous ofhaving frequent Meetings of Parliaments, in order to consult and associate together againstthe Crown, whom they regarded as their common Enemy: [Magna Charta itself was owingto this very Principle.} Whereas the latter, the Corporate-Towns and Boroughs, whichhad Reason to esteem the Crown more their Protector than their Oppressor, had no suchMotives, either offensive or defensive, for associating together. In one Word, the Crown,and the Law-Courts of the Crown, were then the only Security and Defence which tradingCorporations could have had against the Power and Insults of the feudal Baronage.117

In this English version of the these royale, the trading classes are seen as tendingto unpolitical passivity; Tucker had elsewhere observed that the proper conductfor a commercial nation was "to study to be quiet, and to mind our own busi-

115 Robert Brady, An Historical Treatise of Cities and Burghs or Borroughs (London, 1690); ThomasMadox, Firma Burgi, or An Historical Essay Concerning the Cities, Towns and Boroughs of England(London, 1726). Tucker also cites Samuel Squire, Enquiry into the Foundations of the English Consti-tution (London, 1753); see Reed Browning, "Samuel Squire: Pamphleteering Churchman," Eigh-teenth-Century Life 5, 1 (1978), pp. 12-20; and Daines Barrington, Observations on the More AncientStatutes (London, 1769).

116Treatise, pp. 262-5, 292-6, 309-16. 117Treatise, pp. 318-19.


ness."118 An excess of political activity was the characteristic of the lazy, theambitious and unemployed — of patrons and their clients, barons and their re-tainers. Tucker certainly did not consider the patriots of his own time a feudalclass — there was none known to him nearer than Poland — but he did considerthem a set of unproductive nuisances whose ideology was a great deal more feudalthan they recognized; and the London mobs who followed them in politics seemednot unlike the faeces Romuli or the gangs of medieval retainers.

Unfortunately, he did not carry his account of English history past the unedi-fying picture of medieval politics necessary for the destruction of the Gothicmyth, so that we do not know by what stages he thought England had achieveda form of government possible for a commercial society. We may imagine asomewhat Humean account of the process, with Tudor legislation against retain-ers at one end119 and Tucker's insistence that the principles of taxation were notunderstood until the reign of George I120 at the other. It is highly unlikely thatthe independent activities of the borough corporations would have played muchpart in it, since we know from the previously quoted passage that civil govern-ment itself — "the Crown, and the Law-Courts of the Crown" — was to be acrucial agency and that an important objective was the dispelling of the illusionthat landed interest and trading interest were in opposition. Tucker had writtenone of his appeals for separation from America on commercial grounds in theform of the Address to the Landed Interest,121 and it was one of his adversaries —Samuel Estwick, an agent for Barbados — who had argued that American taxationwas a job of the landed interest, designed to reduce the land tax and the nationaldebt.122 In the long-term historical picture, the function of the rise of commercewas to civilize the landowning class and lead them in the paths of industry andexchange, and this need not entail any increase in the political role of the cor-porations; indeed, Tucker could have argued that it was perfectly compatiblewith the dominance of the borough representation by members of the landedgentry. There is certainly no sign that he found this phenomenon objectionable,and we should recall that he found the merit of commercial society to be that itpromoted deference no less than industry.123

118Treatise, p. 52. Xl9 Treatise, p. 3l4n. X2° Treatise, pp. 67, 78.121 This is the page heading used in printing the work cited here as An Humble Address and Earnest

Appeal. The full title was: An Humble Address and Earnest Appeal to those Respectable Personages inGreat-Britain and Ireland, who, by their Great and Permanent Interest in Landed Property, their LiberalEducation, Elevated Rank, and Enlarged Views, are the Ablest to Judge, and the Fittest to Decide, whethera Connection with, or a Separation from the Continental Colonies of America, be most for the NationalAdvantage, and the Lasting Benefit of These Kingdoms. The tone seems to be defiant rather thansycophantic; the implication is that the landed aristocracy and gentry are the fittest to judge of thenation's commercial interests. Cf. Treatise, p. 212.

122 S a m u e l E s t w i c k , A Letter to the Reverend Josiah Tucker . . . ( L o n d o n , 1 7 7 6 ) .123 There is no shortage of evidence that Tucker's admiration for commerce did not make him (any

more than Adam Smith) an admirer of tradesmen. Treatise, pp. 78, 212 and note, 232, 323-5,327; Cui Bono? pp. 50-1 , 53-4.


When Tucker meditated a reform of parliamentary representation, which wasmuch under discussion in 1781,124 he proposed a qualification of resident land-ownership for both county and borough members,125 aimed at discouraging boththe familiar demons of country ideology — "neither the Plunderers of the East, northe Slave-Drivers of the West, nor the Privateering, trading Buccaneers of theAmerican Continent, nor our English Newmarket Jockeys, nor Change-Alley Bullsand Bears" 126 - and the domination of Parliament by residents of London, West-minster, and Southwark, that fertile nursery of patriots.127 For voters he proposeda qualification of forty shillings freehold in the counties, or payment of scot andlot in the boroughs.128 "Any common Day-Labourer, or common Mechanic"might attain the franchise by industry before his old age. On the other hand,

It is indeed a melancholy Reflection, that in most Cities, and Borough-Towns, and per-haps in Counties, the far greater Number of Voters are such, whose Circumstances leadthem to wish for a new Division of Property, because they have little, or nothing to lose,but may have much to get in Times of Confusion, and by a general Scramble. Therefore,every Rule of sound Policy, not to say Religion and Morality, suggests the Necessity ofraising the Qualification of voting to such a Mediocrity of Condition, as would make itthe Interest of the Majority of Electors, to assist in the Support and Preservation of Orderand good Government, and not to wish their Overthrow.129

Tucker is not haunted by the specter of communism so much as by those ofGaius Gracchus, Catiline, and Julius Caesar. Nevertheless, it is hard not to hearthe hoofbeats of the Manchester yeomanry when reading his proposals. Either thehopes of economic self-betterment must be such as to make the injunction enrichissez-vous, et vous deviendrez des electeurs convincing in the ears of every common daylaborer or mechanic, or the scot-and-lot franchise must be a means of unitinggreater and lesser proprietors in a class domination of those with little or nothingto lose. However, we should read the following in conjunction with the passagejust quoted:

Though it would be highly absurd, to admit indiscriminately every individual Moral-Agent to be a Voter, yet true Policy requires that the Voters should be so numerous, andtheir Qualifications respecting Property be so Circumstanced, that the actual Voters couldnot combine against the Non-Voters, without combining against themselves, against theirnearest Friends, Acquaintances and Relatives.130

The socializing and civilizing effects of commerce provide the razor's edge thatcivil government is to walk. Tucker is a progressive conservative, the defender of124John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1972). 125 Treatise, pp. 278 -83 .126Treatise, p . 286. l21 Treatise, pp. 291 -2 .l28Treatise, pp. 2 7 6 - 8 , 284 -5 . Shelton (Dean Tucker, pp. 53ff.) shows that Tucker had argued for

the use of a restricted franchise to encourage self-advancement in the poor as early as his Essay onTrade of 1749.

l29Treatise, pp. 2 9 0 - 1 . l3° Treatise, p . 275.


a commercial order perhaps not much older than himself, which has certainly notfinished evolving.131 But because he sees no contradiction between nature andhistory — and thinks that Locke and Rousseau were wrong to impose it — heholds that the principles of economic progress are those of natural law. He seesno contradiction — nor, given the structure of English society, is there muchreason why he should see it — between upholding the Whig commercial orderand maintaining the primacy of the landed interest, or between proposing toreduce the electoral importance of London in favor of the agricultural shires132

and writing:

Our exclusive Corporations, and Companies of Trades in Towns and Cities, have at presentvery little Power of doing Mischief, compared with what they formerly had. For Men'sEyes begin to be opened every where: And the flourishing State of those great Manufac-turing Places in England (the greatest perhaps in the known World, certainly the greatestin Europe) where every Man enjoys PERFECT FREEDOM to follow that Course of Tradeto which his Genius or Circumstances are best suited; I say, this flourishing State has madethe dullest of us feel, that Industry and Ingenuity are best excited by constant Emulation,and that no Man ought to be armed with the Power of a Law, or with an exclusivePrivilege, to crush his Rival.133

The age of the boroughs was drawing to a close, and one of the irritating thingsabout the word "bourgeoisie" is that we are expected to use it precisely of thetime when its semantic justification was beginning to collapse (if, in English, itever had any). Its employment will not help us to understand why this shrewdand historically sophisticated mind saw no reason why the spread of manufactur-ing and wage relationships outside the older structures should present any threatto the principle of natural authority that it was his purpose to inculcate. Heclosed the Treatise Concerning Civil Government with the injunction the Revolutionregime had maintained since 1688: that it was the duty of a people to obeyconstituted authority until, as a matter of utmost necessity, it became no longerpossible to do so.134 But the false principle, that there existed a body of rightsthat defined the legitimacy of any authority whatever, stemmed to his mind frompremodern sources. The Americans and Dissenters were the heirs of the Puritans;Locke and the patriots were the heirs of the barons; and the Londoners inhabitedno manufacturing city, but a great wen like ancient Rome. Commerce and man-ufacture upheld constituted authority, and it was natural that they should do so.

131 In debate with Hume, Tucker had argued for a future of indefinite progress, which he thoughtHume had denied. Four Tracts and Two Sermons, pp. 23, 41 .

li2 Treatise, pp. 297 -8 . liiCui Bono? pp. 53 -4 .lHTreatise, pp. 3 -4 , 410 -28 . Kenyon, Revolution Principles, pp. 21-34 . Reference may be made to

what Burke has to say about 1688 in both the Reflections and An Appeal from the New to the OldWhigs.


VI

Old Dean Tucker was a fine old man; we study him both for the sake of hisinvigoratingly cantankerous intellect and for the light it is capable of throwingon the defense of the established order in late eighteenth-century Britain. Sincewhen we think of conservatism we have to think of Burke, it is his intellectualas well as personal attitude toward the latter that renders Tucker an intriguingfigure. Ten to fifteen years before Price addressed the Revolution Society, thedean of Gloucester had perceived that the Dissenting emphasis on natural rightswas capable of challenging the legitimacy of all existing governments and thetheoretical possibility of government itself. Perhaps he did not know that by1781 or soon after, Burke was coming to see such arguments as "a preposterousway of reasoning and a perfect confusion of ideas"135 in a prescriptive (or inTucker's terms a quasi-contractual) system of government, or that he was begin-ning to regard Shelburne and his stable of intellectuals at Bowood with a mistrustas vehement as Tucker's own. It might have made very little difference if Tuckerhad known this; there was that about Burke he would never have liked, and inany case he ceased writing after 1785. Though Tucker lived until 1799, hisenergies seem to have failed him,136 and we know nothing of his octogenarianresponses to the French Revolution or to Burke's writings on that event; thislimits our capacity to set the two conservatives in a common frame of comparison.

Born in the same year as Hume, Tucker is like him a conservative of the 1760sand 1770s, when patriots, republicans, Dissenters, and Americans seemed theenemies against whom the Whig order had to be defended. Richard Price, hisdoctrine of natural right, and his interpretation of the Revolution of 1688, hadto be counterattacked in the course of this campaign, and there is a sense inwhich the sermon to the Revolution Society represents the response (almost thesurvival) of an older "Commonwealth" radicalism in the new world the Frenchwere creating. What Tucker had to say about Price in 1781 differed little fromwhat Burke said of him in 1790, but the accidents of political alignment in 1776and after enabled Tucker to stigmatize Burke as almost Price's ally. No doubtthis was unfair, and one wonders whether Burke, whose allusions to Tucker arefew, remembered it in 1790. Of far greater interest, however, is Tucker's deci-sion to mount a full-scale assault on Locke. If he was right in perceiving thatLocke had been a radical actor in 1683—8 and could be used in authorizing aradical interpretation of the meaning of 1688, we must ask why Burke, elaborat-ing in both the Reflections on the Revolution in France and the Appeal from the New to

135Works, vol. X, p. 99.136For the last phase of his life, see Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 255-7 . He seems to have left no

disciples, though a case might be made with regard to William Mitford, the historian of Greece;see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 194—204.


the Old Whigs (an almost Tory account of the English Revolution), made no al-lusion to Locke one way or the other. Had Tucker's Treatise rendered Locke con-troversial? Was he a figure too sacred or too little conspicuous in the Whig canonto be brought back into debate? Our understanding of his reputation as a politicalwriter in eighteenth-century England is still too confused to let us say for certain.Macaulay in the next century has likewise nothing to say about Locke's Treatisesof Government in the course of his generally Burkean interpretation of 1688, butis insistent on clearing him of complicity in Monmouth's rebellion137 (Tuckerinsists on his guilt).138 We may regard Macaulay as carrying on the HollandHouse enterprise of reconciling the shades of Fox and Burke and reharmonizingthe shattered chords of Whig ideology; perhaps this necessitated a myth of Locke'spolitical respectability.139 But to observe silence regarding the Treatises is not topresent them as a classic of moderate constitutionalism, and the stages by whichthey acquired this reputation are still not well understood. Tucker saw them asthey have begun to reappear in the light of recent research, that is, as an essen-tially radical manifesto that appeared when their author and his cause were ceas-ing to be as radical as they had been.140 There was not yet much contemporarydebate about their meaning, and Burke took no part in it.

Tucker's Whiggism is of a different stripe from Burke's, and this must betaken into account when we compare them as conservatives. When Tucker char-acterized himself as "a constitutional but not a republican Whig," he declaredhimself as belonging to the generation of Hume, for whom the Whig orderrequired defense against patriots and Commonwealthmen, Tories and Jacobites,all employing much the same ideology. He therefore situated himself in thetradition of Brady, among those for whom the principles of constitutional libertywere modern rather than ancient and for whom there could be no return eitherto the customs and prescriptions of an ancient constitution or to the principlesinto which these could (Burke said "preposterously") be resolved. Hume in hisHistory of England did the same,141 but he also took a leading part in formulatingthe Scottish perception of history as the progressive elaboration, through themultiplication of commercial relations between human beings, of that growingenvelope of civilized and deferential manners that rendered ancient virtue nolonger necessary. Tucker, who believed himself to have surpassed Hume in show-ing that commercial progress knew no theoretical limits on its future,142 joined

137 Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1913), vol. II,chap. V, pp. 538-9n.

nsFour Letters to Shelburne, pp. 9 4 - 6 .139For this see Ashcraft's articles cited in n. 10, this chapter.140See John Dunn, "The Politics of Locke in England and America in the Eighteenth Century," in

John Locke: Problems and Perspectives, ed. John W. Yolton (Cambridge, 1969).141 Victor L. Wexler, David Hume and the History of England (Philadelphia, 1979).142See Istvan Hont, "The Rich-Country—Poor-Country Debate in Scottish Classical Political Econ-

omy," in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff.


with the Scots in making this the means of rejecting the politics of nostalgia forrepublican antiquity; it is his peculiar originality to have seen that though Lockehad been indifferent to the republican vision of history, his state of nature andtheory of the origin of right to property could be made liable to criticisms iden-tical with those brought against it. To this he added an even shrewder insightinto the religious origins of Lockean thought and the leanings toward both re-publican and natural-rights theory displayed by the radical Dissenters and Amer-icans of his time. Burke came in the path of Tucker's broadsides. Though we cansay with confidence that he shared none of the views Tucker was concerned toattack, we cannot point to much that he had done by 1781 to associate himselfwith the polemic against them conducted by the "scientific Whigs," of whomTucker was one.

It is arguable that he never did. The lucidity of Tucker's commercialism, andperhaps even his proposals for restricting the franchise so as to giwe the poor amotive for accepting a tighter work discipline, attracted the ironic approval ofKarl Marx, who described him as "a Tory and a parson, but for the rest anhonourable man," whereas he could see nothing in Burke except venality andhypocrisy.143 Marx was wrong about Burke, who meant what he said, and theword "Tory" can be used of neither Burke nor Tucker until we understand howthe Whig tradition fell apart and was reconstituted in the years of counterrevo-lution. But we cannot understand this either until we understand the far-reachingchange in the Scottish perceptions of history that Burke helped to bring about ata time when Tucker had ceased to write. To Hume, Smith, Millar, or Tucker,commerce was the motor force behind the growth of manners and the progress ofsociety. As it created increasingly complex social relations, the passions wererefined, the sympathies developed, and human beings became increasingly capa-ble of supporting the edifice of culture and the necessity of government. Com-merce was the precondition of "the progress of the arts" and the elaboration ofmanners, in which the natural relations and subordinations of society were pro-gressively discovered and actualized. But when Burke beheld the proceedings ofthe French revolutionaries, he very early saw in them a program for the systematicdestruction of manners and the substitution of an altogether new and antinaturalcode of social behavior.144 This had begun with an assault on the church, thenobility, and the royal family, but Burke was so far steeped in the belief that amodern commercial society was the ultimate efflorescence of manners that heaccepted the corollary that the destruction of manners could not be accomplishedwithout the destruction of commerce itself. He therefore took up certain hintsdropped by Robertson and other historians, who had depicted the growth ofchivalry and canon law as early movements toward refined manners and a better

143 See Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 264-5. 144For a fuller treatment, see chap. 10, this volume.


circulation of goods, and used them in order to argue that church and nobilitywere necessary to the growth of manners and that manners formed a preconditionof the growth of commerce itself. Burke was explicit in his revision of the Scottishsequence of history.

Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good thingswhich are connected with manners and with civilisation, have in this European world ofours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined;I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy,the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in themidst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes thanformed . . .

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antientmanners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Evencommerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are them-selves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we chooseto worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. Theytoo may decay with their natural protecting principles.145

It is tempting to imagine an aged clergyman in Gloucester reading this pas-sage, as he may well have done. "The gods of our oeconomical politicians," thoughintended probably to refer to the Scottish theorists as a group, might well strikehim as meant for those who "made religion a trade and trade a religion." Butwhat would Tucker make of the proposition that manners, learning, and aboveall commerce could survive only under the protection of the clergy and aristoc-racy? A Whig clergyman in the marrow of his bones — not least so in his refusalto pursue patronage too far - he had begun his career in controversy with thefathers of Methodism146 and knew high fliers and High Churchmen when he sawthem. What would he make of the proposition that the church was independentof commerce, and therefore of government, and was indeed their historical pre-condition along with an equally independent aristocracy? Here, he might havesaid with a flash of his old disgust, was the patriot up to his usual games, playinga baronial and papist card when the republican would not turn the trick. TheUniversity of Oxford declined to offer an honorary degree to Burke at the heightof his counterrevolutionary fame because they were not sure of his churchman-ship,147 and his desire to relieve Irish Catholics was not unconnected with hisdesire for an ultimately civil religion.148 Yet Burke could assign a historical roleto the church; had Tucker done so?

145Burke, Works, vol. V, pp. 154-5. l46Shelton, Dean Tucker, pp. 17-36.147 Thomas W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge and Chicago,

1967); Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, eds., vol. VI, pp. 193-5.148So at least I read the relevant passages in the Reflections (Works, vol. V, pp. 173-8 , 187-98), and

see his avowal that his attachment to Christianity arose "much from conviction, more from affec-tion" {Correspondence, vol. VI, p. 215). Cf. Frederick Dreyer, "Burke's Religion," Studies in Burkeand His Time XVII, 3 (1976), pp. 199-212.


Tucker's misgivings may be imagined to increase as he read on and found inthe Reflections an outburst — not the only one in Burke — against the brutality ofHenry VIII's proceedings in the dissolution of the monasteries.149 Very deep inthe Anglican tradition lay the roots of the belief that the monastic lands shouldhave been preserved and used to endow learning under clerical control; yet wecan say with certainty that Tucker would have preferred even Warburton to Laud,although, to borrow a phrase of his own, "that is saying a great deal."150 NoWhig could support the idea of a church as independent as that, and Tucker sawthe prosperity of learning as bound up with the progress of commerce and thearts; yet here was Burke saying that these forces could not maintain learning, oreven themselves, unless protected by a wealth of land held in entail and mort-main. We might cite text after text showing Burke as aware as Tucker that themainsprings of society were now in commerce,151 and yet, by reversing the his-torical order in which Tucker's generation had ranked commerce and manners,Burke (whatever he thought he was doing) had opened the way to Coleridge'sIdea of a Constitution in Church and State, to Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and inour own time to Raymond Williams's Culture and Society. To the Enlightenmenttheorists commerce had appeared to be the force that refined the manners andextended the sympathies; now it could be argued that it was philistine and util-itarian, made use of a cold mechanical philosophy derived from Bacon and Locke,and did not protect culture and manners at all. Not even a leisured aristocracywas equal to the task, unless reinforced by Coleridge's "national church" and"clerisy," founded upon a "nationalty" of land reserved to maintain learning,which in an ideal history every nation would have established from its begin-nings. Ergo tua rura manebunt.152

Could Tucker have lived to hear of notions of this kind - they were hardlyformulated when he died in 1799 - he would have smitten the "nationalty" forthe historical poppycock it was; and he might have noticed that Coleridge's "cler-isy" is by no means the same thing as a Christian ministry. Even Burke (tocontinue the fantasy) may be imagined joining him here. He saw the FrenchRevolution as a conspiracy of gens de lettres and monied speculators to get theirhands on the lands of the church; to find the former setting themselves up as anew sort of landed clergy might not have seemed incompatible with this inter-pretation, or with Coleridge's Jacobin youth. But in this diagnosis, and later

149 Works, vol. V, pp. 215-18; and A Letter to a Noble Lord, Works, vol. VIII, pp. 38-45.150The Spartans treated the Helots "much worse, and with more wanton Cruelty, than the Planters

do the Negroes in the West-Indies; - And that is saying a great deal"; Treatise, p. 219.151SeeC. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1981).152 These words from Virgil's Georgics form the motto of both the University and the Province of

Canterbury, at whose foundation in 1850 a grant of lands was set aside for the maintenance ofhigher education.


when he defined Jacobinism as the rebellion of "talent" against "property,"153

Burke raised a question unknown to Tucker and the generation of the ScottishEnlightenment. They had seen the cultivated intellect emerging as society wasrefined by the increasing complexity of property relations; but if, as Burke nowdesperately proclaimed, the intellect was turning to the destruction of propertyand social relations themselves, where was the property structure by which intel-lect might be disciplined? Burke was not the leader of a "revolt against theeighteenth century,"154 but he announced that one had broken out and askedwhether enlightened philosophy of history was capable of explaining or remedy-ing it. From now on, there might be stern unbending Tories proclaiming thealliance of church and state as the only answer, and there might be Tory radicalscastigating the existing church and state as quite incapable of providing it. Bothbrands of "Tory" were in fact Whigs, heirs of the latitudinarians and the neo-Harringtonians, respectively, but the Whiggism of Josiah Tucker had relativelylittle to say to the problem of culture and anarchy. Burke had discerned theadvent of the politics of romanticism and alienated sensibility, which has preoc-cupied conservatives ever since; it is in Marxism, paradoxically enough, that wefind continued the conservative assurance that intellect can again be disciplinedby the processes of production. But Burke would have known what to say aboutthe Great Cultural Revolution and the evacuation of Phnom Penh.

™ Works, vol. VIII, p. 70.154 Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1929; revised,

1960).

10

The political economy of Burke'sanalysis of the French Revolution

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertakethe study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider itas a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by itsreader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim nowbecomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to in-telligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as atissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessi-ble and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a singlestructure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements,the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the variouscontexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in thenormal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequenceof the statements being made.

Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. It is the secondwhich will be attempted, in this essay,1 to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution inFrance and subsequently to his Letters on a Regicide Peace. In I960 the presentwriter published in The Historical Journal an essay entitled 'Burke and the AncientConstitution: a problem in the history of ideas',2 in which it was argued thatimportant passages in the Reflections, together with passages from other speechesand writings by Burke, should be understood in the context of a tradition ofcommon-law thought established in the age of Sir Edward Coke, and that they

From The Historical Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 331-49. © 1982 Cambridge University Press;reprinted by permission of the editors.

Earlier versions have been presented to seminars at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Cambridge, and tothe Midwest American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am indebted to all these audiencesfor their comments and suggestions.

2 The Historical Journal, in, 2, 125-43; reprinted in Politics, language and time (New York, 1971).

193


contained explicit and conscious allusions to this tradition and to their own placein it. The present essay will argue that comparably important passages in theReflections and the Letters can similarly be situated in a quite distinct tradition ofthought, which will be termed 'political economy'; but it will not be muchconcerned to inquire into the relations between the two traditions, or the possibleconsistencies and inconsistencies in Burke's text or thought occasioned by the factthat they are both present there. It seems more important to establish that Burkecan be read in both of these contexts than to inquire whether he can be read inboth of them simultaneously; the premises from which he argued and the mes-sages which he may have transmitted can be given a thick description if we applythe first only of the procedures distinguished in this sentence. There is more tothe method of interpretation followed both now and in I960, however, than thesingling out of one thread and then another in the texture of Burke's writings. Abetter analogy is the selection of one and then another facet from, and through,which a multi-surfaced and translucent artefact may be viewed. Burke's responseto revolution looks different when considered as that of a common-law constitu-tionalist, and as that of an exponent of political economy; the prime need is toestablish that it can be looked at in both ways.

The term 'political economy', as is well known,3 can be used with reference tothe late eighteenth century in varying degrees of specificity. We may use it, as itwas then used, to denote either the emerging science of'the wealth of nations' orthe policy of administering the public revenue. Burke admired the work of AdamSmith, and the Reflections and the Letters contain lengthy passages devoted toanalysing the state of the revenue both in revolutionary France (1790) and inbelligerent Britain (1796). But it is and was also possible to use the term todenote a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishingthe moral, political, cultural, and economic conditions of life in advancing com-mercial societies: a commercial humanism, it might not unjustly be called, whichmet the challenge posed by civic humanism or classical republicanism to thequality of life in such societies.4 It will be argued that Burke was a defender ofWhig aristocratic government; that Whig government was identified with thegrowth of commercial society; that Burke saw the Revolution as a challenge tothe Whig order, arising within the conditions that order made possible; and thathe employed the language and categories of political economy in order to analyse

3 Here I am particularly indebted to members of the King's College Research Centre's project on thehistory of political economy, and to the conference which they held in May 1979- See Istvan Hontand Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and virtue (Cambridge, 1983).

4Cf. Albert Hirschman, The passions and the interests, arguments for capitalism before its triumph (Prince-ton, 1975); Duncan Forbes, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975); Donald Winch, AdamSmith's politics, an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge, 1978); Drew R. McCoy, The elusiverepublic: political economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, 1980) and otherworks.

Burke's analysis of the French Revolution 195

the revolutionary threat and respond to it. He did not do so, however, withoutusing language which revealed tensions within Whig society and its ideology andfurthered changes in the ways in which that language was normally used.

Political economy in eighteenth-century Britain was at one and the same timea nascent social science of a remarkably new order, part of an enduring thoughincreasingly historicized science of natural morality, and an ideological defenceof the Whig ruling order which took shape during the first quarter of the century.Burke's political and emotional loyalties were very strongly focused upon thatorder, and it was in its capacity as an ideological defence and moral vindicationthat he most keenly appreciated the new science of political economy and naturalsociability. Far from being one in which the aristocratic and bourgeois principleswere deeply at variance,5 the Whig regime was founded on an assumed identityof interests between a managerial landed aristocracy and a system of public credit,in which rentier investment in government stock stimulated commercial pros-perity, political stability, and national and imperial power. The defence of acommercial order in politics, society and morality, wherever it occurs down toBurke's time and after, is invariably a defence of the Whig regime and generallyof natural aristocracy; and attacks upon the Whig regime are nearly as oftenconducted in the name of real or landed property against mobile or personal. Thefocus of these attacks, however, is not upon trade or the investment of capital incommerce, but upon its investment in government, patronage, and warlike ex-pansion; from this, it was argued, arose the corruption which destroyed the com-mercial empires of Athens and Rome.

Because these attacks were based on an ideal of the ancient citizen, whoseindependence in arms and land assured his political virtue, it was necessary forthe defenders of the Whig commercial order to find an alternative ideal.6 Theydid so by characterizing the ancient citizen as an economically underdevelopedbeing. Because he lacked the ready credit and cash to pay wage-labourers, he wasobliged to exploit the unremunerative labour of slaves and serfs. Because he wasnot involved in the multifarious social relationships which only an advancingsystem of commerce could bring, he could employ his leisure only in activestatecraft and war, or in contemplative metaphysics or superstition. His per-sonality lacked the multifaceted refinements and polishings which arose fromencounters with other human beings in a multiplicity of exchange relationshipsand consumer activities; commerce, it was argued, was the sole agency capable

5 See Isaac F. Kramnick, The rage of Edmund Burke: the conscience of an ambivalent conservative (NewYork, 1979).

6 For other presentations of this argument see my The Machiavellian moment (Princeton, 1975) chs.13 and 14; 'Between Machiavelli and Hume; Gibbon as civic humanist and philosophical historian',in G. W. Bowersock and John Clive (eds.), Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the RomanEmpire (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); 'The Machiavellian moment revisited: a study in history and ide-ology' , Journal of Modern History, LIII, 1 (1981), 49 -72 .


of refining the passions and polishing the manners. The central place — it is nottoo much to say — in Whig ideology between the English and French Revolutionswas occupied by the concept variously expressed as manners, politeness or taste;this offered not only defence against criticism in the name of patriot virtue, butdefence against that partially buried Titan haunting the imagination of the age,the explosive power of enthusiasm. The leading British and European exponentsof the ideology of manners were the moral philosophers, conjectural historiansand political economists of Scotland.7 When Burke visited Glasgow as Lord Rec-tor of its University in 1785 and dined with John Millar, and with Adam Smithin Edinburgh,8 he was among celebrants of a historical view of the progress ofsociety, in which the diversification of labour conducted the human race throughfour stages of production towards the refinement and enrichment of its manners.

The feature of the Whig regime which its ideologists found hardest to defendwas the multiplication of the national debt. Queen Anne Tories, of the school ofSwift and Bolingbroke, had thundered against Whig rule as that of a moniedinterest, made up of men who owned no property or rather had substituted prop-erty of an altogether new kind: the paper tokens of a fluctuating public confi-dence, in which the determinants of the rate at which money could be had, andthe value of all property created, had themselves become a species of commodity.Richard Price, whose sermon to the Revolution Society spurred Burke to writethe Reflections, had argued that the attempt to tax America was a product of theindebtedness and accompanying corruption which the elder Pitt's wars had broughtupon England; and far-left Unitarian as he was, Price had been able to quotecopiously from Hume, that most sceptical and therefore most resourceful of Whigs,as holding an almost indistinguishable position.9 Neither David Hume, AdamSmith, nor as we shall see Edmund Burke,10 was free of the nightmare thatmultiplying paper credit might end by destroying the value and even the mean-ing of property, the foundation alike of virtue, manners and the natural relationsof society.

7 N . T. Phillipson, 'Towards a definition of the Scottish Enlightenment', in P. Fritz and D. Wil-liams (eds.), City and society in the eighteenth century (Toronto, 1973); 'Culture and society in theeighteenth-century province; the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,' in LawrenceStone (ed.), The university in society (Princeton, 1974); 'Hume as moralist; a social historian's per-spective', in S. C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hassocks, 1979); 'Manners, morals,civic virtue and the science of man', presented to the Fifth International Congress on the Enlight-enment (Pisa, 1979); 'Adam Smith as civic moralist', in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and virtue. AlsoGeorge Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment (Historical Association Pamphlets, General Series 99, 1981).

8 The best account of this incident is in The diary of the Rt. Hon William Windham (London, 1866),pp. 6 0 - 1 , 63—4. I am indebted to Mr. E. E. Steiner (Yale Law School) for this reference.

9 Richard Price, Two tracts on civil liberty, the war with America, and the debts and finances of the kingdom(London, 1778), 'Additional Observations', pp. xiii-xiv, 25, 38-39, 47, 51-2, 153n.

10 An exception must be entered to Macaulay's observation (History of England, ch. xix) that onlyBurke was 'free of the general delusion' that the debt would destroy society. He did not fear it inEngland, but did in France.


The revolution of 1688 had been secured by the foundation of the Bank ofEngland and a system of public finance which encouraged investment in thefuture of the new regime and stimulated the growth of its prosperity and power.A century later, the French Revolution was perceived as having seized upon thelands of the French Church and made them its security for the issue of a nationalloan whose paper assignats were to be made legal tender everywhere. Now it isnot possible to read Burke's Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that itpresents this action — and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette —as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.The charge which appears as soon as Burke has completed his denunciation of theRevolution Society and Price's sermon is that in France we see

everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and national bank-ruptcy the consequence; and to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, totteringpower, the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared rapine, heldout as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized speciesthat represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hidthemselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whosecreatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted.11

Even the nocturnal attack upon Marie Antoinette — long notorious as thecentral firework display of Burke's rhetoric — if read carefully, will be seen asfitting into this context. His account of this partly imaginary atrocity leads on,as all readers know, to the even purpler prose of the lament for the decline of theage of chivalry and the triumph of the 'sophisters, oeconomists and calculators',which has driven so many commentators to Freudian and Marxist extremes in theattempt to discover what Burke was going on about. But an acquaintance withthe Scottish historians would have solved the problem for them. Read on to theend of the paragraph, and we shall find 'the unbought grace of life', the 'chastityof honour which felt a stain like a wound', and all the rest of it, summarized inwhat follows by these perfectly sober remarks:

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the antient chivalry; andthe principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, sub-sisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we livein. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this whichhas given its character to modern Europe. It is this which distinguished it under all itsforms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, andpossibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antiqueworld . . . Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; itobliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority

11 The works of the Rt. Hon Edmund Burke (London, 1826; the Rivington edition), v. 88.


to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued bymanners.12

This passage is one which might have come from any of the great historians of

contemporary Scotland. In Robertson's View of the progress of society in Europe (1769),13

or in Millar's Origin of ranks (1771),14 Burke might have read — and he probably

had — that the peculiar nature of feudalism differentiated the history of Europe

from that of other societies, and that the rise of chivalry, with all its extrava-

gances, was a revolution in manners occurring within the feudal world, by which

barbarian warriors had begun to civilize themselves, to acquire more polished and

humane modes of conduct towards the weak, the female and one another, and to

promote the increased circulation of material goods and the skills entailed in

producing them. It had been a major step in the direction of a commercial and

polite society and the cultural characteristics that went with them. In the same

way, wrote Robertson, the canon law, while doubtless promoted by the clergy to

defend the riches brought to them by superstition, had promoted justice and

respect for property and, by converting the struggle for ownership into the inter-

pretation of a code by lettered men, had rendered manners more gentle and

society more rational.

And Burke continues:

Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good thingswhich are connected with manners and with civilisation, have in this European world ofours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both combined;I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy,the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in themidst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes thanformed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid itwith usury, by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy if they had allcontinued to know their indissoluble union, and their proper place! Happy if learning,not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspiredto be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be castinto the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.15

The last phrase of course was to do Burke no good with his artisan readers; but

observe that it is the revolutionary intelligentsia who are to play the role of Circe

to the swine, and let loose a herd which only a fully organic society has the

manners to educate. He goes on:

12 Works, v, 151.13 The works of William Robertson (London, 1824), Hi, 28-33, 55-7 (chivalry and feudal law), 65-71

(canon law), 72-4 (chivalry). Note the association of both phenomena with commerce and towns.14Text in W. C. Lehmann,>£» Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge, I960), pp. 210, 212-18 (chivalry);

Millar, Historical view of the English constitution (London, 4th edn, 1818), I, 109-26; II, 135-7.15"Works, v, 154.


If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antientmanners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Evencommerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are them-selves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we chooseto worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished. Theytoo may decay with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at least,they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to apeople, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not alwaysill supplies their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment totry how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of athing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordidbarbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pnuc, possessing nothing at present,and hoping for nothing hereafter? 16

Burke is asserting that commerce is dependent upon manners, and not theother way round; a civilized society is the prerequisite of exchange relations, andthe latter alone cannot create the former. The political economists (or 'oeconom-ical politicians'), the historians of the Scottish school,17 had as we have seen rec-ognized clerical learning and feudal chivalry as preconditions of the growth ofcommerce; but Hume, Robertson, Smith, Millar — we may add Gibbon — had allisolated the growth of exchange, production and diversified labour as the motorforce which created the growth of manners, culture and enlightenment. Burkecharacteristically regards this as preposterous, as mistaking the effect for the cause.He insists that commerce can flourish only under the protection of manners, andthat manners require the pre-eminence of religion and nobility, the natural pro-tectors of society. To overthrow religion and nobility, therefore, is to destroy thepossibility of commerce itself. The assault upon Marie Antoinette betokens thedestruction of chivalric manners, which is part of the destruction of the secondestate; and this in turn leads, as Burke explains in more detail, to the destructionof the first, to the seizure of the lands of the church and their use to establish adespotism of paper currency, itself fatal to property, commerce, trade and man-ufacture. The ancien regime is a microcosm of the history of Europe: feudal con-quest, clerical and political organization, commercial and cultural growth; all isorganized around a historical edifice of manners, and it is the structure of Euro-pean civility which the Revolution is in process of destroying.

We have next to inquire by what agencies this destruction is being carried out,and the possibility may arise that it is by something in the nature of a Marxistbourgeoisie. But if men of commerce are doing all this, Burke is insistent that

l6Works, v, 155.17 So it seems proper to read the phrase; but 'the gods of our oeconomical politicians' may be a gibe

at Josiah Tucker, who had attacked Burke bitterly in 1776 and was said to 'make religion a tradeand trade a religion.' See George Shelton, Dean Tucker and eighteenth-century economic and politicalthought (New York, 1981), pp. 164-5.


they are destroying the possibility of commerce itself; and since we know thatthe vocabulary of eighteenth-century England distinguished sharply betweencommerce and speculation in the public debt - stockjobbing was to trade, Bol-ingbroke once wrote, as faction was to liberty18 - it seems arguable that Burkeis presenting religion, chivalry and commerce as trodden down together by thehoofs of a paper-money despotism. Following the next section of the Reflections,concerned largely with the English determination to maintain an established andlanded church, Burke proceeds:

By the vast debt of France, a great monied interest had insensibly grown up, and with ita great power. By the ancient usages which prevailed in that kingdom, the general circu-lation of property, and in particular the mutual convertibility of land into money, and ofmoney into land, had always been a matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather moregeneral and more strict than they are in England, the jus retractus, the great mass of landedproperty held by the crown, and by a maxim of the French law held unalienably, the vastestates of the ecclesiastick corporations - all these had kept the landed and monied inter-ests more separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species ofproperty not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country . . .

In the mean time, the pride of the wealthy men, not noble or newly noble, increasedwith its cause . . . There was no measure to which they were not willing to lend them-selves, in order to be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride, and to exalt their wealthto what they considered as its natural rank and estimation. They struck at the nobilitythrough the crown and the church. They attacked them particularly on the side on whichthey thought them most vulnerable, that is, the possessions of the church, which, throughthe patronage of the crown, generally devolved upon the nobility.19

There is no indication here that the revolutionary men of wealth are a classseeking to maximize the profits of capital invested in commerce and manufacture.They are described, in language drawn straight from the vocabulary of QueenAnne Toryism, as a 'monied interest . . . grown up . . . by the vast debt' whichthe government had contracted in order to wage its wars. Burke is employing,here as throughout his diagnosis of the French Revolution as a conspiracy tocreate a paper-money despotism, a language first created to attack the foundationsof the Whig order he is concerned to defend. He has told us, of course, that thisorder is more stable than the ancten regime because it encourages the investmentof money in land and the conversion of land into money; it is this fluidity ofcapital, compared with the rigid barriers between estates, which makes the po-litical edifice of English manners more harmonious than the French, and on thispoint Burke is as '©economical' a 'politician' as any professor in Scotland. But his'monied interest' is still situated between a landowning class on the one hand anda debt-contracting government on the other, and it is this which differentiates it

18 Remarks on the history of England, letter xiv (2nd edn, London, 1747), p. 169.19 Works, v, 204-6.


from a commercial or industrial bourgeoisie in the conventional sense of theword. In France, Burke's revolutionary monied interest grasps at power in orderto carry out a vast expansion of public credit.

It does so by seizing on the lands of the church; and Burke must be aware thatthis can hardly be the main strategy for revolutionaries in England. The expro-priation of the church there had been an episode of the sixteenth century, and thePuritan attempt to complete the process had fallen short of complete success.Deeply as Burke came to fear the revolutionary potential of English Dissent, hemust have known that there were limits to what it could achieve by furtherdisestablishment in the economic field. The vindication of a landed clergy, how-ever, was an act to be performed, and it is of great interest to find Burke denounc-ing the 'tyranny' of Henry VIII's proceedings against the monasteries and quotingat length on this subject from Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill.20 The deepestdiscord in the Anglican tradition was the nostalgia for lands which might havebeen retained to endow a clergy and make them patrons of learning and the poor;and if Burke used the language of Swiftian Toryism to denounce the moniedinterest, here he used the language of the Laudians and stands on the brink of ahigh-churchmanship he could never have adopted21 — one, moreover, capable ofbeing put to radical use. No doubt Burke could have assured the Whig aristocratswhom he delighted to serve that their ancestors' seizure of church lands wasjustified by the merger of landed and monied interests which it had made possi-ble, though this is rather far from what he told Bedford in A letter to a noble lordwhen that magnate permitted himself a sneer at Burke's pension.22 It was in thelogic of Burke's argument that from now on, landed aristocracy must either bepraised for guaranteeing commerce and culture or condemned for failing to doso, and the voice of Denham was enough to make it clear that this would be noeasy matter. Forty years later, William Cobbett was to denounce the EnglishReformation and all its fruits, precisely because it had facilitated the growth ofcapitalist landownership and the monied interest.23 The Whig Burke had placedhimself at a point from which Tory and Radical argument could take off.

Let us revert to Burke's account of France. His anatomy of the revolutionarymovement does not stop with the affronted men of wealth; he writes:

Along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up, with whomthat interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the political Men of Letters.

20 Works, v , 215—18. For Denham and his poem, see Brendan O Hehir , Harmony from discords: a lifeof Sir John Denham (Berkeley, 1968) and Expans'd hieroglyphics: a study of Sir John Denham's "Cooper'sHill" (Berkeley, 1969).

21 Frederick Dreyer, 'Burke's religion, ' Studies in Burke and his time, XVI I , 3 (1976) , 1 9 9 - 2 1 2 .22 Works, v i n , esp. p p . 3 8 - 4 5 , where Henry VIII 's tyranny recurs.23 Wil l iam Cobbett, A history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (two vols. , London,

1824).


Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation. Sincethe decline of the life and greatness of Lewis the XlVth, they were not so much cultivatedeither by him, or by the regent, or the successors to the crown; nor were they engaged tothe court by favours and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period ofthat ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court protection, theyendeavoured to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their own; to which thetwo academies of France, and afterwards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopaedia, carriedon by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little contribute.24

The circumstance that the gens de lettres were organized without being adequatelypatronized had been commented on by d'Alembert and has interested modernscholars.25 Burke, who earlier observes that the English deists 'never acted incorps, or were known as a faction in the state',26 explains that the philosophesconstitute an anti-religious faction, and indeed an interest, distinct from themonied interest but intrinsically allied with it. Being organized for the destruc-tion of the Christian religion, they supply an ideological justification for thespeculators in the public credit, who seize on the church lands in order to increasethe sphere of their operations. And there is reason to suppose that Burke sees thisalliance between the two interests as more than an accidental convergence. Else-where in the Reflections occurs the following:

Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public debts,which at first were a security to governments, by interesting many in the public tranquil-lity, are likely in their excess to become the means of their subversion. If governmentsprovide for these debts by heavy impositions, they perish by becoming odious to thepeople. If they do not provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the mostdangerous of all parties; I mean an extensive discontented monied interest, injured andnot destroyed. The men who compose this interest look for their security, in the firstinstance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, to its power. If they find the oldgovernments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficientvigour for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy;and this energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contemptof justice. Revolutions are favourable to confiscation; and it is impossible to know underwhat obnoxious names the next confiscations will be authorised . . . Many parts of Europeare in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a con-fused movement is felt, that threatens a general earthquake in the political world. Alreadyconfederacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary nature are forming, in several

24 Works, v , 2 0 7 .25 D ' A l e m b e r t , Essai sur la Societe des Gens de Lettres ( 1 7 5 4 , 1771); Ores t R a n u m , Artisans of glory:

Writers and historical thought in seventeenth-century France (Chapel H i l l , 1980) . Burke ' s analysis beginshere to an t ic ipa te t he views of A u g u s t i n Coch in , Les societes de pensee et la democratic (Par is , 1921) ,interest in which has recently been revived (n. 5 0 , below).

26Works, v , 172 . 21 Works, v , 2 8 2 .


And here there is a footnote:

See two books entitled, Einige Originalschriften des llluminatenordens — System und Folgen desllluminatenordens, Miinchen, 1787.

Burke is not known to have read German, and it is not clear from what sourcethese references to the Illuminati reached him.28 To know this is perhaps of lessimportance than to know whether continental European publicists perceived themas he did - namely, as typifying the alliance of organized but unpatronized in-telligentsias with the machinations of discontented public creditors; for such isBurke's general perception of revolutionary movements about 1790. It would bevaluable to know this for two reasons: first, it would help us to reconstruct Burke'sunderstanding of ancien regime France in crisis, and the information on which hedrew. Secondly, we need to know whether an extraordinary dread of the powerof public credit to subvert the natural relations of society is peculiar to the English-speaking lands of the period or is dispersed through European society. In thepassage just quoted, this fear is the occasion for the emergence of a key term inBurke's analysis of revolution: the term 'energy'.

There were two social forces which David Hume, pioneer philosophical de-fender of the aristocratic monied order, had identified as destructive of naturalsociety. One was enthusiasm, which - he had written in the History of England -suspended all the normal relations between effects and their causes which ac-counted for social behaviour.29 Though this usually appeared in the form of reli-gious fanaticism, it was to be understood as occurring when the mind was leftalone with its own creations and mistook these for real causes operating on itfrom without.30 Burke's 'metaphysics' and 'preposterous way of reasoning' maybe considered as descriptions of enthusiasm occurring in a non-religious form.The second destructive force recognized by Hume was public credit, which - hehad written in an essay bearing that title31 — was capable of substituting itselffor all forms of property and for all the natural relations between men in society,of which he had named 'nobility, gentry and family . . . a kind of independentmagistracy in a state, instituted by the hand of nature'32 as constituting the threemost vulnerable to the subversions of paper. Hume had seen this destructive forceas issuing from the sovereign executive, and as reducing proprietors to 'a stupidand pampered luxury' and 'lethargy';33 he had not discerned a connection between

28 A possible candidate is August Ludwig Meyer, formerly a librarian at Gottingen, who visitedEngland and was in touch with Burke during 1788-90. See The correspondence of Edmund Burke, VI(ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, Cambridge and Chicago, 1967), 256-7.

29David Hume, History of England (new edn, London, 1762), V, 55-6.30Ibid., pp. 56-7.31T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (eds.), The philosophical works of David Hume (London, 1875), in,

360-74 ('Of public credit').32Ibid., p. 368. 33Ibid., p. 367.


public credit and enthusiasm. Yet it was precisely when property and naturalsubordination, the sources from which manners arose in society, had been sub-verted by paper that the mind was left alone with its own fantasies; what had themadness of the South Sea Bubble been but the enthusiasm of public credit? Inthe account Burke gives of the gens de lettres, philosophes and illuminati, the expan-sive power of the monied interest is being most expressly brought together withthe uncontrollable energy of enthusiasm, the intellect divorced from all naturalrelations — from manners and subordinations, from the laws of nature and na-ture's God - feeding on its own fantasies and substituting itself for every otherform of power.

At a later point in the Reflections Burke declares:

The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among theburghers, and the monied directors who lead them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman,and the peasant have none of them habits, or inclinations, or experience, which can leadthem to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France. Thevery nature of a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations andall the pleasures they afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way of procur-ing and exerting influence) in a manner impossible amongst country-people. Combinethem by all the art you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into individ-uality. Anything in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable amongst them.34

Now here it is hard to believe that Burke is describing English society. As aseasoned if unsuccessful Whig politician, he knew perfectly well that countrygentlemen were entirely capable of combination, arrangement and influence, andin insisting on the 'miscibility' of landed and monied interests which differen-tiated England from France, he had given one very good reason for this. (Hemight indeed have asked himself whether French landowners would not be gladof the opportunity to invest in a public debt.) As for the striking word 'burghers',it had been adopted from the Dutch about 160035 to describe townsfolk, surelybecause the English 'burgesses' had been too far absorbed into its parliamentarycontext to do so, and because English contained no such category noun as theFrench bourgeoisie and felt little need for one. If we argue that Burke had complexand ambivalent feelings about the bourgeoisie, we must face the fact that he hadno word for them, and as far as we know no concept. Is he struggling here toformulate one? He continues:

It is obvious that, in the towns, all the things which conspire against the country gentle-man combine in favour of the money manager and director. In towns combination isnatural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion, their business, theiridleness, continually bring them into mutual contact. Their virtues and their vices aresociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half disciplined intothe hands of those who mean to form them for civil or for military action.34Works, v, 347-8. 35O.E.D., sub voce.


We do not usually think of the bourgeoisie as a standing army, or London andBristol as garrison towns; no more did Burke. The burghers he describes heremight exist in France or the Netherlands,36 but never in England as he knew it;and as for their social composition -

All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind that, if this monster of a constitutioncan continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societiesin the towns formed of directors of assignats and trustees for the sale of church lands,attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers, composing an ignoble oli-garchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility and the people.Here end all deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men.37

The 'burghers' here revert to being a Swiftian monied interest, rendered for-midable by their alliance with an independently organized intelligentsia; it is nottheir desire to invest capital in commerce or industry that makes them a revolu-tionary class. But the word 'combination' must catch our eye. We may recall thatit is when 'bad men combine' that 'good men must associate'.38 If country peopleare incapable of 'combination', is there something in the conditions of town lifefavourable to a 'combination' of energies which is antisocial because not led byHume's 'nobility, gentry and family . . . a kind of independent magistracy . . .instituted by the hand of nature'? If so, Burke would be lamenting the lack of aneffective natural aristocracy in France, and intimating that one could only existunder conditions of Whig 'miscibility.'

The problem of energy and combination recurs, but is stated in rather differentterms, in the Letters on a regicide peace of 1796—7 — that wild jeremiad of a mindat the end of its tether, in which Burke declares that what is going forward inEurope is not a war between nations but a civil war waged by a 'sect', 'conspiracy'or 'armed doctrine' of revolutionary fanatics, who aim at nothing less than thedestruction of natural society itself. Before this — he had already written in Aletter to a noble lord — men of property

were found in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs,the cavalry, the iron and the gunpowder, of a handful of bearded men, whom they didnot know to exist in nature.39

And in the second of the Regicide letters is found a similar comparison with

the power by which Mahomet and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerfulempires of the world . . . and, in not much longer space of time than I have lived,overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an empire from the Industo the Pyrenees.40

36For armed 'burghers' in the Austrian Netherlands, see Correspondence, VI, 267.37Works, v, 349-50 . ^Thoughts on the present discontents; Works, n, 330.59Works, vm, 53. 4oWorks, vm, 254.


Burke uses these historical instances of the utterly unexpected because he de-sires to say that something has happened unknown to previous history: somethingunknown to history because it did not previously exist in nature, unknown innature because it is aimed at the destruction of nature itself; something whichseeks to carry out an entire revolution in manners, he informs us, and so to 'strikeat the root of our social nature'.41 But this entirely demonic conspiracy has itselfa social origin, and the difference between the Reflections and the Letters may befound in the way in which Burke's ideas on this subject have developed. The gensde lettres are still there, to represent the power of the decivilized intellect; but therole of the monied interest has diminished in visibility, and the 'burghers' havevanished altogether from the page. In the Reflections Burke had spoken of theconfiscatory monied interest's search for governments possessed of greater 'en-ergy', and his predominant concern in the Letters is to develop the idea of an'energy' unchained from all the restraints of society. In place of the alliancebetween monied interest and gens de lettres, we are now told that the Revolutionwas made by 'two sorts of men . . . the philosophers and the politicians'. If weask who these 'politicians' were, we learn that they comprised

the active and energetick part of the French nation, itself the most active and energetickof all nations . . . I am convinced that the foreign speculators in France, under the oldgovernment, were twenty to one of the same description then or now in England; and fewof that description there were, who did not emulously set forward the Revolution. Thewhole official system, particularly in the diplomatick part, the regulars, the irregulars,down to the clerks in office (a corps, without all comparison, more numerous than thesame among us) co-operated in it. All the intriguers in foreign politicks, all the spies, allthe intelligencers, actually or late in function, all the candidates for that sort of employ-ment, acted solely upon that principle.42

The monied interest has not disappeared, but it is now the bureaucrats andtechnicians of national power who pursue confiscation as the means of nationalaggrandizement. They have become revolutionaries by a route the ideologicalopposite of that the monied interest might be expected to follow.

From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain of monarchy itself, as a systemof government too variable for any regular plan of national aggrandizement . . . They hadcontinually in their hands the observations of Machiavel upon Livy. They had Montesquieu'sGrandeur et Decadence des Romains as a manual; and they compared, with mortification, thesystematick proceedings of a Roman senate with the fluctuations of a monarchy.43

. . . What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to which all the meanswhich wit could devise, or nature and fortune could bestow, towards universal empire,was not of force to give life, or vigour, or consistency - but in a Republick? Out the wordcame; and it never went back.44

41 Works, viii, 172-3. 42Works, vm, 240-1. 4i Works, viii, 244. 44Works, vm, 246-7.


Republics, as Machiavelli well knew, were for expansion; but in eighteenth-century England the admirers of Livy's citizen warriors usually saw themselves atthe opposite pole of social being from the speculators and stockjobbers of themonied interest. Burke, defender of the Whig order with its commerce and ci-vility, can imagine the two coming into alliance. The republic expands throughconquest, the monied interest through confiscation. Such a republic destroys manas social being, to reconstitute him as armed citizen; its nature is what we shouldcall totalitarian.

In that country entirely to cut off a branch of commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, todestroy the circulation of money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture,even to burn a city, or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost them a moment'sanxiety. To them the will, the wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individ-uals, is as nothing. Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state isall in all . . ,45

The assignats are now only one among the instruments of a despotism wieldedby an alliance of literati, who aim not at the maximization of their investment inthe public debts, but at naked power for its own sake. The Revolution is atrahison des clercs:

Never can they, who, from the miserable servitude of the desk, have been raised to empire,again submit to the bondage of a starving bureau, or the profit of copying musick, orwriting plaidoyers by the sheet.46

But the power of such persons may still have an origin in wider social change:

A silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and prepared it . . . It wasno longer the great and the populace. Other interests were formed, other dependencies,other connexions, other communications. The middle classes had swelled far beyond theirformer proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in society, theseclasses became the seat of all the active politicks; and the preponderating weight to decideon them. There were all the energies by which fortune is acquired; there the consequenceof their success. There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and are impatientof the place which settled society prescribed to them . . . The correspondence of themonied and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies, but, above all,the press, of which they had in a manner entire possession, made a kind of electrickcommunication every where.47

The 'electrick communication' is probably Mesmer's rather than Franklin's;48

but is it in the term 'middle classes', purely English though it is, that Burke comesclosest to formulating a 'bourgeois' theory of revolution? Thirty-five years later,at the time of the Reform Bill debates, the case for the measure was that there45Works, vin, 253. A6Works, vm, 256. 47Works, vm, 259-60.48 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968) for

an 'electric communication' as sympathy passing immediately from person to person.


had come to exist a 'public opinion', the political attribute of the 'middle class'or 'classes', which required only to be represented in parliament and neithershould nor could be subjected to the restraints of'interest', 'dependency' or 'con-nexion'. To this the Anti-Reformers replied that to permit such a 'public opinion'free and unconnected operation would be as revolutionary a measure as any un-dertaken in France. In the 1830s an ideologue or two can be found49 who equatesthe rise of 'public opinion' with the 'history of civilization', with 'the middleclass', with personal as opposed to real property and with command over thelabour of others: the formula for a bourgeoisie in the Marxist sense of the term.Burke does not make any such equations, but he is visibly helping to lay thefoundations for both sides of the 1832 debate. What interests him about 'publicopinion' - a term which does not appear in the passage from which I have beenquoting — is the occurrence of a revolution in communications: the growth of asociety where, he says, 'there was no longer any means of arresting a principle inits course',50 and enthusiasm, fanaticism and metaphysical politics could havefree play. For the reformers of 1832, 'public opinion' was committed to a newsystem of property relations and therefore need not be feared; but in Burke's eyesit had nothing to do with manufacture and commerce at all, its agents wereliterati, bureaucrats and technocrats, and the form it took was 'energy', 'talent','a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity'.51

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.52

We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of a state, in which theproperty has nothing to do with the government. Reflect, my dear sir, reflect again andagain, on a government, in which the property is in complete subjection, and wherenothing rules but the mind of desperate men. The conditions of a commonwealth notgoverned by its property was a combination of things, which the learned and ingeniousspeculator Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagineto be possible. We have seen it; the world has felt it; and if the world still shut their eyesto this state of things, they will feel it more.53

'Dreadful energy' is the phrase whose meaning we have to penetrate. If, in somedialogue of the dead, Karl Marx be imagined explaining to Edmund Burke54 that

49 E .g . W . M . Mackinnon, On the rise, progress and present state of public opinion in Great Britain andother parts of the world (London, 1828); History of civilisation ( two vols. , London, 1846). For theaspect of the Reform Bill debate ment ioned above, I am indebted to Professor Barton L. Boyer(College of Idaho), a member of my 1980 N E H Summer Seminar.

50 Here again we are reminded of Cochin; n. 2 5 , above. See Kei th Michael Baker, 'Enl ightenmentand Revolut ion in France: old problems, renewed approaches' , Journal of Modern History, LI I I , 2(1981) , 281—303, for a study of Francois Furet 's revival of Cochin's views.

5 1Works, v m , 214 . ( 5 2Works, v m , 170. "Works, vm, 255-6.

54 It is not easy to imagine, since most of Marx's surviving references to Burke are merely philistine;he impugned his motives without considering his argument. Capital (Moscow 1959), I, 170, quotedin Shelton, Dean Tucker, p. 264.


he had simply failed to recognize that one system of property relationships wasreplacing another, and that the 'dreadful energy' was that of the revolutionaryand triumphant bourgeoisie, Burke must be imagined retorting that Marx wasanother 'learned and ingenious speculator' who had simply failed to recognize thespectacle of human energy disengaged from any system of property relationshipswhatever. Should Marx reply that this was impossible, since all human energywas by its nature involved in productive activity and the generation of new prop-erty relationships, Burke would declare that this comparatively liberal and rela-tively optimistic dogma failed to bring him any comfort, since he had seen avision of human energy turned wholly and systematically destructive. It is avision which many have had since his time, and sometimes with good reason.

And Burke saw the antithesis against which this energy was aimed as a liberalcommercial society, the Whig order as ruled by Sir Robert Walpole and ex-pounded by Adam Smith. The states of the civilized world, he declared, flour-ished by multiplying and by satisfying the needs of men, and the more effectivelythey did this, the greater the resistance they must overcome in mobilizing theirresources to meet the challenge of revolutionary systems to which 'the state wasall in all'. Britain could effectively meet such a challenge only because of theenormous taxable surplus which her affluence produced, and Burke silently pointedto the underlying problem of Pitt's strategy: was the expansion of British com-merce an adequate substitute for the application of military power?55 The Lettersend with a review of the national resources, and we recall a passage towards theend of the Reflections in which 'virtue' is defined as most highly displayed in themanagement of the public revenue. Burke to the last was a man of his modernage, with little nostalgia in his make-up.56

This inquiry points to certain provisional conclusions, and to certain agendafor further research. Burke was a Whig, the defender of an aristocratic and com-mercial order which could be represented as at once natural and progressive anddefended by reference to a system of civilized manners. 'Manners', he wrote, 'areof more importance than laws. . . . According to their quality, they aid morals,they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this the new French legisla-tors were aware',57 and had set out to inculcate a new system of manners alto-gether contrary to nature. The Revolution was the crime against society ratherthan against God; Burke's Christian feelings were real but not spiritual — theyarose, he once declared, 'much from conviction, more from affection'58 — and hetended to see religion mainly as the sacralization of man's social nature. Manners,

"Works, vm, 251-3.56This interpretation is reinforced by that of C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, 1981; in the Past

Masters Series). Since the present writer has often differed from Professor Macpherson, it is apleasure to record the closeness of their views on this subject.

^ Works, vm, 172. ™ Correspondence,\\, 215.


then, offer us a key to his argument; but a strictly progressive theory of manners,such as Burke might have derived from his Scottish acquaintances, presentedthem as arising, and fulfilling the natural sociability of man, only in the courseof the commercialization, refinement and diversification of society. In outlininghis differences with 'our oeconomical politicians', Burke declared that mannersmust precede commerce, rather than the other way round, and that modern Eu-ropean society needed and must not sever its roots in a chivalric and ecclesiasticalpast. This move — to borrow a term now much employed — was historicist andtraditionalist, but it was not reactionary. It anchored commerce in history, ratherthan presenting it as the triumph over history, and here we may cautiously linkBurke's argument as studied in this essay with the appeal to prescription andimmemorial usage studied in 'Burke and the Ancient Constitution'. If'manners'were mceurs, refined and enriched by the progress of society, they were also consu-etudines, disciplined and reinforced by the memory of society; and presumption,prescription and prejudice were signs and means of society's determination tokeep its memory alive. Burke proposed to keep the past actual, but he did notpropose to return to it; there is no neo-medievalist programme for reactivatingan age of chivalry or an age of faith, only a declaration that to destroy the histor-ical structure built up by older social forms must lead to the destruction of societyin its modern character. It is 'manners', that key term in the defence of commer-cial humanism, which the demonic revolutionaries have set out to subvert, andit is the strength of a commercial Britain by which they must be defeated.

Nevertheless, Burke's 'view of the progress of society in Europe' constitutes asignificant revision of the Scottish perception of history, and it would be inter-esting to know what the heirs of Robertson thought of his insistence that com-merce had been and remained dependent upon aristocracy and established reli-gion. To most eighteenth-century defenders of Whig civilization, the rise ofcommerce and the rise of polite culture went together, under the name of 'theprogress of the arts', and required to be defended together, against those whohankered after the austere republicanism of Spartan or Roman antiquity. WhenBurke proposed to reverse the Scottish thesis that commerce had been the motorforce behind the growth of manners, he went some way towards encouraging theview — soon to become widely held — that commerce might generate a 'mechan-ical philosophy' and a 'dismal science', hostile to the point of philistinism to 'theprogress of the arts'. We have not therefore lost sight of the perspective in whichBurke may appear to some degree involved in a 'revolt against the eighteenthcentury'.59 If he held that aristocratic patronage and established religion werenecessary links in the connexion between civilized manners and expanding com-merce, he had, by calling attention - as he overtly did - to the problematic

59 Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the revolt against the eighteenth century (London, 1929, I960).


relation in English history between Whig aristocracy and Anglican church, raisedthe question whether this alliance in fact held together. Both Tory and Radicalneo-medievalists were now in a position to argue that it did not, though weought probably to add that both were in their way mutants — 'romantic' mutantsif the term is safe to use — of an essentially Whig stock.

The presence in Burke's argument of this problem — not to call it a contradic-tion - reopens one of the most difficult questions in Burkean studies: how far hiswritings on the Revolution form a commentary on English and how far on Frenchaffairs. On the one hand, the Whig 'miscibility' of landed and monetary propertyis said not to have been duplicated in France, so that weaknesses arising fromtheir separation ought not to be feared in England. On the other, there are im-plicit weaknesses in the Whig order — the Church is not wholly out of danger —and Burke did end by falling into an acute dread of revolutionary activity inEngland. These fears, however, are not explained by his analysis of French affairs.His conviction that nine-tenths of Dissenters were Jacobins at heart60 cannot beaccounted for by supposing that he saw them as public creditors, incorporatedphilosophes or armed burghers. It may be, of course, that he feared the Englishradicals and anti-war Whigs less as revolutionaries in their own right than asfellow-travellers with someone else's revolution, anti-patriots judging by a dou-ble standard, which is exactly what some of them were. But the problem ofrelating Burke's analysis of French to his analysis of English affairs remains, andis heightened in proportion as we uncover the intense and idiosyncratic characterof both. How far — again — is his account of that 'middle class' society, in whicharistocratic patronage and segmentation have failed and 'electrick communica-tion' ensures the instant explosion of opinion into enthusiasm, a diagnosis of theancien regime in disintegration, how far a warning of what England may become?

To answer such questions, it would be valuable to know more about two things.The first is the reception of Burke's anti-revolutionary writings by his Englishreaders, rather especially those sympathetic to them. Because we believe theirimpact to have been great, we have tended to take it for granted, and have notstudied in detail exactly what messages they transmitted. An author is not nec-essarily read as he intended; but if we knew how responsive Burke's readers wereto his doctrines about 'monied interest', 'armed doctrine' and 'dreadful energy',we might know how far he was writing in language shared with his contempor-aries, and what the sources of that language were. The second area calling forinvestigation is Burke's understanding of the last phase of ancien regime society.There is clearly more here than sentimentalizing about the French royal family,or the complacent assumption that France could easily have been remodelledalong Whig lines; more than he could have picked up from emigre nobles like

^Correspondence, VI, 419-20 . Cf. Works, vm, 141-2.


Lally Tollendal. What he has to say about the 'monied interest', the 'men ofletters', the 'burghers' and the 'politicians' (or technicians of national power) mayor may not be nonsense; but it is the product of information carefully arrangedalong systematic lines, and by no means all of it results from the application ofEnglish bugaboos to French affairs. He seems to have thought of the disintegrat-ing ancien regime as one in which powerful combinations could be formed in theabsence of royal and aristocratic techniques of control through patronage, and itwould be desirable to know where he got his information regarding 'moniedinterest', 'philosophers' and 'politicians' as forming such combinations. He seemsto have thought — at any rate while writing the Reflections — of the public debt asa powerful agent in bringing about this state of things, and it would be desirableto know how far this belief was an extension of the Anglo-Scottish obsession withdebt as subversive of natural social relations and how far it was shared by Frenchand European observers. Here Burke's dealings with the exiled finance ministerCalonne might be explored; they corresponded (though not very intimately), andBurke made use of Calonne's Etat de la France.61 His understanding of both Frenchand English affairs, like his philosophy of society in general, is seen to have arisenfrom sources even deeper and more complex than has been suspected: more deeplyand widely rooted in the language and thought of his time.61For references to Calonne in the Reflections, see Works, v, 243, 245, 246, 334-5, 374, 413, 421

and n. For Necker's report on the finances, v, 219-21, 236-40, 244, 402, 410, 425.

PART III

11

The varieties of Whiggism fromExclusion to Reform:

A history of ideology and discourse

I. From the First Whigs to the True Whigs

"But she is a Whig," an academic woman of high distinction once said to me ofCaroline Robbins, whom this essay was first written to honor.1 The descriptionmay have been culturally rather than historiographically apt; a case can be madefor regarding Professor Robbins not indeed as a gravedigger, but certainly as adeconstructor of the Whig monolith — if, that is, it should not be thought"Whiggish" to maintain that there ever was one. Her major work, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman,2 appeared in 1959, and its function was to reveal tous the existence of a persistent tradition of Whig dissent, in which a successionof Old Whigs, True Whigs, and Honest Whigs - collectively known to us as"Commonwealthmen" — kept up a criticism of the principles and practices of theregime known to us as "the Whig supremacy," originating before its foundationsin the Revolution of 1688 and audible well after the revolutions of 1776 and1789. There was in fact a profound schism in Whig political culture, and wehave been working out its implications ever since. Let us review the historio-graphical chronology.

Almost thirty years earlier, Herbert Butterfield had taught us to view withsuspicion what he called "the Whig interpretation of history," and by 1959 wehad begun studying its origin as itself a historical phenomenon. In the processits character had undergone a change, from the selective progressivism criticizedin The Whig Interpretation of History to the antiquarian fundamentalism identifiedin The Englishman and His History1" and further explored in The Ancient Constitution1 An earlier version was presented to a panel on Professor Robbins's work at the 1981 annual meetingof the North American Conference on British Studies.

2Caroline A. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: 1959).3 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931); The Englishman and HisHistory (Cambridge, 1944).

215


and the Feudal Law,,4 The problem of Whig historiography has since 1959 becomeincreasingly an aspect of the problematic history of Whiggism, and two majorcaesuras may be detected in the development of the latter. In 1967 J. H. Plumb5

established the paradigm of the "Whig oligarchy": after a period of broadlybased and turbulent politics lasting through 1714, the Whig party hardened intoa regime, and the Septennial Act and other measures of the early Hanoverianyears formed agoverno stretto of aristocratic patronage wielders not seriously shakenuntil after 1760. The fairly continuous and consistent ideology6 of Caroline Rob-bins's Commonwealthman now appeared as the language of protest against thisregime, employed alike by its Tory opponents in church and country and by itsOld Whig critics in the boroughs now excluded from power, although the sim-plicities of this classification are now undergoing serious challenge. Between 1965and 1970, Bernard Bailyn7 established the paradigm of the "republican synthe-sis," in which the American Revolution was revealed as the repudiation not onlyof parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies, but of parliamentary sovereigntyas an acceptable form of government - a repudiation that had made powerful andeffective use of the language of Commonwealth and country denunciation of thecorruptions of Whig parliamentary oligarchy.

To Caroline Robbins, the Commonwealthmen had appeared a succession ofinteresting but on the whole ineffective ideologues, and this interpretation hasbeen independently but automatically followed by those historians for whom allpolitics are oligarchic and all ideologies ineffective. As early as 1949, however,Butterfield had drawn attention to the role of a radical brand of ancient consti-tutionalism among the Middlesex and Yorkshire petitioners of 1780, when thelast of the old country movements had signaled a crisis with some drastic impli-cations;8 and after Bailyn's contribution, the republican synthesis vastly enlargedthe possible significance of the Commonwealth ideology. Its criticism of execu-tive patronage, public credit, and standing armies was seen as stemming from

4J. G, A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957; New York, 1967).5J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1660-1730 (London, 1967).6The word "ideology" is here used loosely and perhaps casually, since it seems at least very difficultto employ consistently or rigorously. I use it in three senses that often overlap: (1) thought con-sidered as rhetoric or speech in action; (2) thought determined and constrained by, and at times intension with, the forms of speech available for its expression; and (3) a view of the world determinedby the various factors that may be held to have determined it (there being no single preconceivedtheory as to what these may have been).

7 Bernard Bailyn, Political Pamphlets of the American Revolution, vol. 1; no more published (Cambridge,Mass., 1965); The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); The Originsof American Politics (New York, 1970). There is now an extensive literature on this time; for con-venient bibliographies see two essays by Robert S. Shalhope in The William and Mary Quarterly:"Towards a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in Amer-ican Historiography," 3d ser., XXIX (1972), pp. 49-80; "Republicanism and Early AmericanHistoriography," 3d ser., XXXIX (1982), pp. 334-56.

8Herbert Butterfield, George 111, Lord North and the People, 1779-80 (London, 1949).

The varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform 217

the republicans of the interregnum and even the Renaissance, and as capable ofgrowing into a fully fledged republicanism. If this growth was stunted in Britain,it provided Americans with the language of genuine republican revolution; ifGordon Wood9 and others demonstrated that it had to be drastically remodeledto become the language of Federalism, Lance Banning10 and others demonstratedthe profoundly country and Commonwealth character of Jeffersonian oppositionto the programs of Alexander Hamilton, denounced as the heir of Walpole. Atthis point it became necessary to turn back to Britain and inquire how far the oldradicalism (and, by implication, an opposed conservatism) was continued, oralternatively transformed, in the decades following 1784 and 1793. Among bothAmerican and British historians, then, debates continue that can be intimatelyrelated to the publication in 1959 of The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman andto historiographical events occurring since.

In that specialized domain inhabited by historians of political discourse, twodevelopments may be noted as relevant. In I960 Peter Laslett established thatLocke's Treatises of Government must have been composed in the early 1680s.11

From this it followed, first, that when written the Treatises must have expressedintentions far more revolutionary than could have been read into them whenpublished at the end of 1689; second, that the Revolution was, as had long beforebeen pointed out, justified in language more conservative, and involving far morereliance on historical continuity, than anything to be found in the Treatises; third,as we shall see further, that the Old Whig or Commonwealth criticism of theRevolution Settlement expressed itself in a distinct set of terms, whose radicalismwas not necessarily derived from Locke. Caught in cross fire from three directions,the old view that Locke had provided the orthodox justification of the EnglishRevolution, and by the same series of arguments had inspired the AmericanRevolution,12 necessarily dissolved, and it became apparent that his role, whichwas obviously great, in the thought of the eighteenth century would have to bereconstituted by means of a new description. How this is to be done remains amatter of much debate.

Lastly, the present writer, who ventures here to name himself among his bet-ters, had by 1977 completed an elaborate synthesis, begun as early as 1964,13

that offered to trace the history of the republican synthesis from its classical and9 GordonS. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-87 (Chapel Hill, N .C. , 1969).

10 Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y. , 1978).11 Peter Laslett, ed.,John Locke: Two Treatises on Government (Cambridge, I960, 1963).12 It is always difficult to document one's straw men succinctly. A good example is Carl L. Becker,

The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York, 1922; severalsubsequent editions).

13J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays in Political Thought and History (New York,1971); The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N.J . , 1975); The Political Works of James Harrington(Cambridge, 1977). See further "The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History andIdeology," Journal of Modern History LIU, 1(1980), pp. 49 -72 .


humanist beginnings. It was a cardinal thesis with him that a persistent emphasison the armed citizen, enshrined in perpetuity in the Second Amendment to theConstitution of the United States, had entailed as an ideological consequence theideal superiority of real over personal property, and that this had imparted anagrarian and classical character to eighteenth-century republicanism, infecting itwith ineradicable doubts and ambivalences regarding the growth of a world com-merce that it otherwise ardently welcomed. Since the Whig oligarchy, now es-tablished as the dominant reality of Anglo-American history in the eighteenthcentury, was based on the management of a system of public finance by a class ofgreat landed proprietors, this duality of mind among its critics and opponentshad interesting implications and could be related to those other dualities of Toryand Old Whig, country and Commonwealth, Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian ele-ments that the opposition to Whig oligarchy so manifestly contained. This inter-pretation, however, has proved too dialectical for those liberal and Marxist his-torians - in this respect curiously difficult to tell apart - who are wedded pastseparation to an ultimately "Whig" interpretation in which nothing counts ex-cept the rise of liberal individualism and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. Thesehave incessantly accused the republican synthesis of doing less than justice topossessive individualism and of not assigning it the central role in the history ofideology in the eighteenth century. In a variety of essays the present writer hassought to explain how a system of commercial values, historicist rather thanindividualist in character, was formulated during the Enlightenment in the courseof a complex dialogue with the classical republican criticism. This controversy isa further consequence of the fragmentation of our concept of "Whiggism" thatoccurred when the "oligarchy" and the "Commonwealth" were seen in oppositionto one another. The essay to which this is the preface is devoted to accepting thisfragmentation as a fact and to pursuing the history of "Whiggism" as a worddenoting a diversity of realities. It will necessarily follow that a reevaluation ofthe changing meanings of "Toryism" must be undertaken as part of the enter-prise.

The history pursued will be presented in terms of ideology and discourse ratherthan behavior, on the presumption that what people claim to be doing and howthey justify it is just as revealing as what they finally do. This approach of coursein no way precludes asking who and what they were. Such a history of Whiggismwould necessarily begin with J. R. Jones's "First Whigs,"14 the men of Shaftes-bury - unless there should be uncovered any significant links with the epony-

14J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-83 (Oxford, 1961).


mous "Whiggamoies" of the Scottish hills, a possibility to which the Anglo-centrism usual with historians tends to close our eyes. Who the First Whigs wereand what they were attempting is a question notoriously hard to resolve; inter-pretation is currently turning back toward the view that the central facts of Res-toration politics were the reestablishment of the church and the institutionaliza-tion of dissent, and that the First Whigs were a faction of former Presbyteriansseeking to put together an alliance of Anglicans and Dissenters aimed at preempt-ing the policy of indulgence, whereby the crown sought to make itself the patronof dissent and lessen its dependence on the church and church party.15 If thereligious rather than the constitutional establishment is to be made the centralissue, we must downgrade (though we cannot ignore) the tradition of seeing theWhigs as primarily concerned with safeguarding whatever gains Parliament couldbe supposed to have inherited from the years of civil war and interregnum; reli-gion was the issue on which Parliament was dragged back into self-assertion, andthe Test Act was to stand beside the Toleration Act as pillars of the central pierof the Whig edifice — a perception quite generally held in the first half of thenineteenth century. However this may be, the experiment of making religion thecentral issue enables us to coordinate recent research in ways interesting to thehistorian of ideology.

We must now place at the center of the picture a phenomenon that in the yearsfollowing the Restoration certainly could not have been called Whig, though itwas later to form part of what we call an "Augustan" ethos and think of as anideological buttress of the "Whig supremacy." This is the emergence of a lati-tudinarian churchmanship, a rational religion aimed at repressing, moderating,or replacing the "enthusiasm" now thought of as the essential characteristic ofPuritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit, with all itschiliastic and antinomian capacity to turn the social as well as the metaphysicalworld upside down. Doctoral candidates - those straws who know which way thewind is blowing - are working with increasing concentration on what they terma Restoration "politics of culture," the redefinition of religious man as a politerather than a prophetic being, whose communion with God is exercised from themidst of human society and culture, reinforced by and reinforcing their author-ity.16 Important developments in philosophy occur as we pursue the growth ofthis world view through the Cambridge Platonists to Locke, with a detour byway of Bishop Cumberland and the revival of natural law; at the end of the pathmay be glimpsed the figures of Addison and the third earl of Shaftesbury, theWhig Erasmus and the Whig Montaigne. We are indeed dealing here with a

151 am indebted on this point to correspondence with Dr. Mark Goldie.16See, e.g., W. Craig Diamond, "Public Identity in Restoration England: From Prophetic to Eco-

nomic," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1982; Lawrence E. Klein, "The Rise of Politenessin England, 1660-1770," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1983.


strand of that Erasmian tradition of which the present master of Peterhouse haswritten so eloquently.17 Research of this kind travels in convoy with the work ofMargaret Jacob18 and James Jacob,19 both of whom have emphasized the emer-gence of a rational world order that ultimately reinforced the Whig politicalorder, while it underwent persistent challenge from a more radical and illuministrationalism of hermetic and spiritual origins. Though this radical illuminism ischiefly to be met with among excluded groups of republicans, it may also befound keeping Hobbesian and absolutist company; the revolutionary temper doesnot choose its allies in attacking the liberal. But if we are to acknowledge theexistence of a Radical Enlightenment, and allow for a revival of enthusiasm inthe age of the democratic revolutions, we must also admit that, in both Britishkingdoms, the Magisterial Enlightenment was a surprisingly clerical affair, ow-ing quite as much to prelates as to philosophes: to English latitudinarians andScottish Moderates in their unending warfare against antinomianism and enthu-siasm.

In identifying (though hardly exploring) this surely most important of all ide-ological developments of the Restoration, we have traveled far enough from thecompany of the First Whigs, who had yet to cement an alliance with latitudinar-ian churchmanship. Their temper was neither irenic nor oligarchic and theirradicalism owed a good deal to their alliances with London malcontents, thoughthere are radical interpretations of Locke that may make a shade too much of thegreen-ribbon survivals of whom John Wildman was so questionable a represen-tative. All attempts to synthesize the political arguments of the First Whigs havehad to wrestle with the unstable blend of conservative and radical elements theyseem to present, but yet another attempt may be offered here. The relevant chap-ters of The Ancient Constitution andthe Feudal Law, published in 1957, emphasizedthe Whig appeal to the antiquity of the House of Commons but did not do muchtoward establishing the theoretical context in which it occurred; this has now,after nearly a quarter century, received its first restatement in Subjects and Sover-eigns, the work of Corinne C. Weston and Janelle R. Greenberg.20 Professor

17H. R. Trevor-Roper, "Religion, the Reformation and Social Change," and "The Religious Originsof the Enlightenment," both in his The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuriesand Other Essays (New York, 1969).

18Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y. , 1976);The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London, 1981).

19James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), and Henry Stubbe: RadicalProtestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob,"The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitu-tion," Isis LXXXI 257 (1980), pp. 251-67; and Jacob and Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London, 1983).

20Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Con-troversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge, 1981).


Weston's earlier book, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (1965),21

remains the reigning study of Charles I's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions ofParliament, which Weston has elevated to the rank of a major document in thehistory of English political thought. In this memorable if ill-fated manifesto,the king was made to describe the constitution as a coordinated but not self-perpetuating balance of three powers, his own being but one. Research and inter-pretation since 1965 have shown that there were several directions in which ar-gument could move from this point. The doctrine latent in the Answer could beused in dealing with the question of what was to happen when there was warbetween the three powers, which ultimately brought it into the context of thecontroversy over de facto authority. It could be used by radical republicans, ofwhom James Harrington was the most striking theorist, in contending that thehistoric constitution had failed to provide the equilibrium which it offered andthat a new and perhaps socially based separation and balance of powers - a genu-ine republic - must be sought instead.22 Lastly, and this is Professor Weston'scontribution, it could be used to argue, necessarily in a parliamentarian interest,that King, Lords, and Commons found and affirmed their balance in a coordinateexercise of legislative sovereignty.

The authors of Subjects and Sovereigns contend that the last is the correct contextin which to understand the so-called Brady controversy, the debate over the an-tiquity of the Commons in 1680-2.2 3 In arguing that the Commons were im-memorial, the Whigs Petyt and Atwood were not arguing for some Mcllwainiandoctrine of fundamental law or anticipating Burke's appeal to prescription — nodoubt The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law can be read in one or both ofthese senses - but were trying to include them as coordinate in the exercise oflegislative sovereignty; in denying their antiquity, Robert Brady was trying toexclude them from it. The debate concerned the location of sovereignty, a con-cept to which exclusionist First Whigs were as responsive as their opponents. Theinterpretation is an attractive one, especially if a Whig concern with parliamen-tary sovereignty can be made to coexist with a Whig adoption, occurring aboutthe same time (1675), of arguments concerning the excessive influence of theexecutive ministry in parliamentary proceedings, their use of patronage and cor-ruption, their designs to bring in standing armies, and the need for frequent,triennial, if not annual, parliaments as the only means of forestalling the minis-ters and their designs.24 For it is in this coexistence that the conceptual originsof the later Whig schism may be found. Whigs who desired to rule employed

21Corinne Comstock Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords (New York, 1965).22Pocock, Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 15-42.23Pocock, Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, chap. VIII; Subjects and Sovereigns, chap. VII.24Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, chap. IV; The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 406-16 .


arguments leading to the sovereignty of Parliament; Whigs who desired to op-pose employed arguments about the independence of representative from execu-tive and of property from patronage, which led ultimately to the separation ofpowers and looked beyond it to republicanism. These arguments were not a Whigmonopoly; they were country in character and it still seems worth calling themneo-Harringtonian;25 but when Old Whigs, True Whigs, and Commonwealth-men desired to criticize Whig rule, the arguments were available to them. Thedebate among Whigs of the next century may be summarized in the form: Wasparliamentary sovereignty possible without parliamentary corruption? Was par-liamentary virtue possible this side of the republic? It was summarized in thisform by David Hume.

Petyt and Atwood affirmed the antiquity of the House of Commons; HenryNeville carried out the move from Harringtonian to neo-Harringtonian positionsby professing that Petyt and Atwood had partially converted him to this doctrine,which Harrington himself had only cautiously adopted. By locating the com-monwealth of armed freeholders in a modified feudal past, however, Neville leftroom for a doctrine of historical change, which in more simplistic hands couldbecome one of corruption or degeneration from original principles. This dualityis only one of several in the complex pattern of argument in the early 1680s.Petyt's Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680), Atwood'sJ^j An-glorum ab Antiquo (1681), and Neville's Plato Redivivus (1682) are, like JamesTyrell's Patriarcha Non Monarcha (1681) and more remotely, Locke's Treatises ofGovernment (not published until 1689) and Algernon Sidney's Discourses of Govern-ment (not published until 1698 and needing reaffirmation of its authenticity),outgrowths of the debate that followed the republication of Filmer in 1679—80.We may never have a complete study of this controversy in all its none-too-coherent ramifications, for though it has been shown that Filmer was a seriousand intelligible thinker,26 and that his arguments retained significance for thefirst generation that debated the Revolution of 1688, he has not been made toappear a key figure in any party's tradition or to have articulated positions centralor enduring in English thought. The transformations of Toryism have been toomany for that. In this survey of the variations of Whiggism, a crucial point isthat if Locke's Treatises were composed as early as we now believe, they envisagedan "appeal to heaven" and a "dissolution of government" that had not yet taken

23For criticisms of this term, see J . R. Goodale, "J. G. A. Pocock's Neo-Harringtonians: A Recon-sideration," History of Political Thought I, 2 (1980), pp. 237-60; J. C. Davis, "Pocock's Harrington:Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington," Historical JournalXXIV, 3 (1981), pp. 683—98; Enrico Nuzzo, "La riflessione sulla storia antica nella cultura repub-licana inglese del' 600," Atti dell' Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche XCI (1980), pp. 91 -183 .

26Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford, 1975); J. W. Daly, Sir Robert Filmerand English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979). Both are based on Peter Laslett's edition of Patriarchaand Other Political Works by Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949).


place, and therefore compassed and imagined rebellion to a degree not ap-proached by any of the tracts published during the Filmerian controversy. It isthis that has upheld attempts to read them as an appeal to London radicalism ofan almost green-ribbon flavor,27 and no doubt it explains why they long remainedunpublished and why Locke was careful not to have them on his person when hewent abroad in 1683; he could have shared the fate of Sidney if caught with suchmaterial in his cabinet. They were published, however, and it is now a difficultyabout the Treatises that we have to read them as they were read — that is, aspublished after the miraculously bloodless appeal to heaven of 1688 - knowingthat we are not reading them as they were written. This is not merely a problemin the interpretation of Locke's writings and career; it is a point of significance inunderstanding the transition from the First Whigs to the Revolution Whigs.

(Hi)

Locke returned to an England (with the doings of Scottish Whigs we are not yetconcerned) in which an appeal to heaven had been made but had not resulted ina dissolution of government, or in the civil war with which such an appeal wasassumed to be coterminous. The appeal to heaven, however - the drawing butnot the stroke of the sword - had rendered sharply problematic the legitimationnot simply of the events preceding and following the flight of James II, but ofthe governing institutions, whether ancient or still to be established, that he hadleft behind him. From this perspective, which was not only a Tory one, theRevolution might seem to present first and foremost a problem in the legitima-tion of de facto authority, such as had engrossed debate after 1649, and this mustexplain the republication after forty years of so many works relating to the En-gagement Controversy.28 In John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty, Julian H.Franklin has proposed to connect the Treatises of Government with George Lawson'sPolitica Sacra et Civilis,29 a work of the late interregnum, and has traced the wayin which a doctrine of original sovereignty, coined to show how a people mightrestore government after it had been dissolved, grew into a means of justifyingtheir action in precipitating its dissolution. Resistance theory was not far re-

27 Richard L. Ashcraft, "The Two Treatises and the Exclusion Crisis: The Problem of Lockean PoliticalTheory as Bourgeois Ideology," in J. G. A. Pocock and Richard L. Ashcraft, John Locke: Papers Readat a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles, 1980); "Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises ofGovernment: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory," Political Theory VIII, 4 (1980), pp. 429—86.

2 8 See Q u e n t i n Sk inner , " H i s t o r y and Ideology in the Engl i sh R e v o l u t i o n , " Historical Journal V I I I , 2

(1965), pp. 151-78.2 9 J u l i a n H . F rank l in , John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance

in the Political Thought of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1978). For comment see Conal Condren,"Resistance and Sovereignty in Lawson's Politica: An Examination of a Part of Professor FranklinHis Chimera," Historical Journal XXIV, 3 (1981), pp. 6 7 3 - 8 1 .


moved from a profound acceptance of authority.30 To read the Treatises in thisway, however convincing as reconstruction, is not the same as weighing theircontribution to the debate in which they were published; most recent scholarshipon the Revolution controversy has dwelt on their relative inconspicuousness inthat context.31 The central point, of course, is that apologists preferred to arguethat the government was not dissolved, that traditional institutions retained theirauthority, and that the actions taken and being taken were to be justified byreference to known law. The extent to which this argument was offered tosweeten the bitter pill of necessity and obligation de facto on Tory palates pre-vents our echoing the praise Macaulay lavished on the Revolution fathers for theiranticipation of Burkean prudence and prescription; even Burke's interpretationof the Revolution is not as Burkean as that; but William Atwood, who is classi-fied as a "radical Whig,"32 emphasized in one of the few contemporary notices ofthe Treatises that their doctrine was admirable but unnecessary, since the govern-ment had not been dissolved.33 Whigs were beginning to opt for leaving theEnglish people under the authority of their own history. This had not been At-wood's point in upholding the ancient constitution against Brady, but by theend of his career he was beginning to maintain the authority of ancient Englishinstitutions over the other kingdoms of Britain.34 The uses of history were many,and the authority of nature dangerous.

There were, however, substantial groups of Whigs who wished that the gov-ernment had been dissolved and that the Convention had proclaimed itself some-thing more than a parliament: a constituent assembly looking toward a radicalremodeling of the constitution. Locke himself seems to have been in sympathywith this position and may well have printed the Second Treatise in an attempt tofurther it.35 It is difficult, however, to discover much unity of ideology or pro-gram among these discontented Whigs, whose existence is of such importance tothe story we have to trace. A few pamphlets issued from the vicinity of John

30Skinner, "History and Ideology in the English Revolution"; Martyn P. Thompson, "The Idea ofConquest in Controversies over the 1688 Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas XXVIII, 1(1977), pp. 33-46; Mark Goldie, "Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate,1689-93," HistoricalJournalXX, 3 (1977), pp. 569-86.

31 J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1688-1720 (Cambridge, 1977); Martyn P.Thompson, "The Reception of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 1690-1705," PoliticalStudies XXIV, 2 (1976), pp. 184-91; Mark Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure ofPolitical Argument," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities LXXXIII 4 (1980), pp. 473-564.

32Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689," so classifies him.33 W i l l i a m A t w o o d , The Fundamental Constitution of the English Government (London , 1690) , p . 1 0 1 ;

Fmnklin, John Locke, pp. 105-98.34 A t w o o d , The History and Reasons of the Dependency of Ireland upon the Imperial Crown of the Kingdom of

England (London , 1 6 9 8 ; a reply to Molyneux ) ; The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the ImperialCrown of England over the Crown and Kingdom of Scotland (London , 1 7 0 4 , 1705) .

35 Ashcraft argues this case at length and convincingly; see n.27, this chapter.


Wildman and Richard Hampden;36 Lois G. Schwoerer has identified a group ofhard-core First Whigs who wanted to use the Declaration of Rights to effect asharp reduction in the powers of the crown.37 These were neither London radicalsnor republican doctrinaires, but seasoned Exclusionists whose reliability had oncebeen carefully noted by Shaftesbury himself with such marks as "worthy" or"honest." This is not enough to identify them with a further group of sometimeExclusionist pamphleteers — Robert Ferguson, Samuel Johnson, and others (iden-tified by Mark Goldie in a crucially important article entitled "The Roots of TrueWhiggism")38 - whose means of limiting the powers of the crown was to insiston the necessity of frequent parliaments, triennial if not annual, and who camewithin a few years to lament that the revolution of 1688-9 had failed to effectthis restoration of what they claimed was an ancient constitutional liberty. Someof them, including Ferguson, even reverted to Jacobite plotting in the hope ofachieving the radical program by means of a Stuart restoration - much as theirLeveller predecessors had plotted with Royalist exiles in the 1650s. Goldie's group,as his choice of a title indicates, were the immediate predecessors of Robbins'sCommonwealthmen and belonged to that world of London radicalism with whichShaftesbury and Locke had maintained close contacts; some of them had been inHolland with Locke in the years of exile and conspiracy after 1683,39 and hadpromoted Monmouth's expedition with its radical and popular manifestos. Yetin laying the foundations of the Commonwealth tradition, they were at the sametime laying those of the tradition we denominate "country." The independentgentry of the shires were to show themselves not unresponsive to the argumentthat frequent parliaments were necessary if the patronage of the crown was not tobring members into dependence on the executive, and the passage from republi-canism to Jacobitism was to be a recurrent phenomenon in opposition conductfrom 1689 to 1745. With the coexistence and interchangeability between urbanand agrarian opposition of which it is an indicator we shall be much concerned.

Goldie's True Whigs did not borrow significantly from Locke's Treatises ofGovernment. The one outstandingly radical doctrine these contain is that of thedissolution of government, and there may well have been those in the radicalgroups who wanted to bring it about as a means to the institution of frequentparliaments. Yet not only is the case for these best stated in language not to befound in the Treatises, but Locke himself explicitly rejects both the case and itslanguage. There is a crucial difference here that needs underlining at this point.36Franklin,y0/&» Locke, p. 103, n. 38 and p. 108, refers to these as "Lawsonian"; others see them as

more authentically radical.37 Lois G . Schwoerer , The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Ba l t imore , 1981) .38 Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought I, 2 (1980), pp. 195-

236.39Ashcraft, articles cited in n. 27, this chapter.


As early as 1675, Shaftesbury and perhaps Locke - if we believe that he had anyhand in writing the Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country, atract central to Shaftesbury's campaign to bring about a dissolution of Parliamentwhen Danby seemed to be bringing its militant Anglicanism into alliance withthe king - had been denouncing prolonged parliaments as tending to corruption;after their defeats in 1679 and 1680, they had equally denounced the arbitrarydissolution of parliaments by the prerogative. The logical remedy lay in the elec-tion and reelection of parliaments at frequent but regulated intervals, which Har-rington had endeavored to provide by the devices of rotation and which the man-ifestos of the Good Old Cause, put out by discontented officers before and afterthe publication of Oceana, had presented as the principal objective of the politi-cally militant soldiers of 1647—9.40 Here we have the reason for the appearanceof Harringtonian language in the Shaftesburean rhetoric of 1675-6, which -restated in the "neo-Harringtonian" form made necessary by the persistence ofthe historic constitution — was to make so great an appeal to urban and countryoppositions in the eighteenth century. But we also have a link with somethingolder and more urban than Harrington: a London-based radicalism looking backthrough the lens of the Good Old Cause to the Agitators and Levellers of 1647,of whom John Wildman was a living if battered reminder. With the small mas-ters and old soldiers of London Shaftesbury and Locke kept up their association;if Locke was involved in plotting insurrection in 1683 or 1685, it was withrepresentatives of this radical underground.

This had its own political language, as old as the Levellers, in which naturalrights and historic birthrights merged in coexistence if not in consistency; therecan be no greater error than to suppose that the argument from natural rights byits nature tended toward radicalism, the appeal to history toward conservatism.There arose a claim to the effect that frequent or annual parliaments were rootedin medieval or Anglo-Saxon antiquity, so that to deny them by prorogation ordissolution was to deny Englishmen their inheritance or birthright in the consti-tution. Here was an ancient constitutionalism more radical than Petyt's or At-wood's, closer to the concerns of the more violent Shaftesbureans and serving tolink them with their Commonwealth antecedents. It was among men of theseantecedents, and professing such language, that Locke moved when, in Londonor Amsterdam, he moved in conspiratorial circles. The Second Treatise, we mustsuppose, was written at some time during the years when Locke was keeping suchcompany and associating himself with conspiracy and insurrection, as he perhapsdid with the Rye House plot, and very probably with Monmouth's rebellion.41

40See "James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of his Ant-ing?" Journal of British Studies X, 1 (1970), pp. 30-48.

4lAshcraft, "Revolutionary Politics," reopens the question of Locke's involvement. See n. 27, thischapter.


Yet the thirteenth chapter of the Second Treatise explicitly rejects the positionthat the intervals between parliaments can be provided for as part of the originalconstitution of government. Though it leads toward Locke's concluding argu-ment that failure to call a parliament at the proper time is one of the missteps bywhich a prince may put himself in a state of war with his people, it explicitlydeclares that the calling and dissolving of parliaments is a power that may be andhas been reserved to the prerogative.42 The chapter proceeds to declare that it isfor the prerogative and executive power to reform the representation of the peoplein Parliament by erecting new corporations where old ones have become depo-pulated,43 and is followed by the chapter headed "Of Prerogative," in which theexistence of a power capable of setting laws aside is justified on the grounds thatsalus populi suprema lex esto. All that makes Locke's argument a revolutionary oneat this rmportant point is the further series of claims that the prerogative mustbe exercised for the public good; that it is entrusted to the prince in order that itbe so exercised; that if it is exercised to the public harm, for example in thecalling and dissolving of parliaments, the trust is dissolved and with it the gov-ernment; and that the judges of whether this has happened are necessarily thepeople, who may by appealing to heaven - that is, by drawing the sword -proclaim that the prince has put himself in a state of war with them.

42 ". . . for it not be ing possible t ha t the first framers of the g o v e r n m e n t should , by any foresight, beso m u c h masters of future events , as to be able to prefix so just periods of re tu rn and dura t ion tothe assemblies of the legislative in all times to come, that migh t exactly answer all the exigenciesof the commonwealth; the best remedy that could be found for this defect was to trust this to theprudence of one who was always to be present, and whose business it was to watch over the publicgood. . . . Thus supposing the regulation of times for the assembling and si t t ing of the legislativenot settled by the original consti tution, it naturally fell into the hands of the executive, not as anarbitrary power depending on his good pleasure, but with this trust always to have it exercised onlyfor the public weal, as the occurrences of times and change of affairs might require. Whether settledperiods of their convening, or a liberty left to the prince for convoking the legislative, or perhaps amixture of both , hath the least inconvenience at tending it, it is not my business here to inquire,but only to show that though the executive power may have the prerogative of convoking anddissolving such convention of the legislative, yet it is not thereby superior to i t . " Two Treatises ofGovernment, chap. 13, sec. 156.

43 "Salus populi suprema lex is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he who sincerely followsit, cannot dangerously err. If therefore the executive, who has the power of convoking the legisla-tive, observing rather the true proportion than fashion of representation, regulates, not by oldcustom, but true reason, the number of members in all places that have a right to be distinctlyrepresented . . . it cannot be judged to have set up a new legislative, but to have restored the oldand true one, and to have rectified the disorders which succession of t ime had insensibly, as well asinevitably introduced . . . prerogative being nothing but a power in the hands of the prince toprovide for the public goou, in such cases which, depending upon unforeseen and uncertain occur-rences, certain and unalterable laws could not safely direct; whatsoever shall be done manifestly forthe good of the people, and the establishing the government upon its true foundations, is andalways will be just prerogative. The power of erecting new corporations, and therewith new repre-sentatives, carries wi th it a supposition that in t ime the measures of representation migh t vary . . .and whenever the people shall chuse their representatives upon just and undeniably equal measures,


This is certainly a revolutionary doctrine, as well as a theory of revolution, butthere is room for debate in which of several senses it is a radical one. Certainly itexpresses neither a conservative nor a radical constitutionalism; at this point it isnot a constitutionalist doctrine at all, but is advocating a prerogative exercisedpro salute populi and tempered only by the threat of dissolution of the governmentand consequent civil war. It reads very like the language of desperate men in theearly 1680s, turning to thoughts of civil war or the threat to use it - a threateasily countered by a government that called out its troops and appealed to thepolitical nation with the perfectly justified cry "Forty-one is come again." Butthe conjunction of prerogative and revolution is a long way from the radicalconstitutionalism of the Levellers and the Good Old Cause; what kind of popularabsolutist, one is entitled to ask, might King Monmouth have turned out to be?The problem is to explain why Locke rejected the language of his own radicalassociates, who continued to argue for frequent parliaments as a constitutionalright on radical-historical grounds.

The Revolution of 1688-9 was accepted by Tories on the grounds that theancient constitution had been set aside as an act of necessity rather than of right,and (or so they struggled to add) a de facto government erected until time shouldremedy the situation. It was justified by those whom we shall be calling theruling Whigs as an act carried out within the structure of the ancient constitu-tion, designed to preserve it and legitimated by it. Though these were the argu-ments of those whom the Revolution enabled to continue as rulers in England,neither was very complete or satisfactory;44 and as we shall see, Burke and evenMacaulay were still struggling to reconcile them with each other. John Locke,satisfied by neither argument and none too happy with the revolution takingshape in 1689, published (but did not admit having written) his Treatises of Gov-ernment as a service to those who argued that there had been a dissolution of thegovernment, a reversion of power to the people, and an opportunity for radicalreconstitution. This act gave him a certain place in the continuum of Englishradical thinking. There were always those who held — sometimes on Lockeangrounds — that what occurred in 1688—9 had been a dissolution of the regime ifnot the government, an election of a monarch by the people, and an affirmationof a right to do the same again should need arise.45 The Treatises of Government

suitable to the original frame of the government, it cannot be doubted to be the will and act of thesociety, whoever permitted or caused them so to do." Ibid., sec. 158.

44 This is the argument of Kenyon, Revolution Principles. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, arguesthat perceptible changes in the prerogative were made in consequence of pressure from the moreradical faction she has identified.

45See Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith, "Locke, Revolution Principles and the Formation ofWhig Ideology," Historical Journal XXVI, 4 (1983), pp. 773-800. This traces a continuation fromLocke through Defoe of the view that James II had been deposed and replaced by his people.Occasionally expressed throughout the eighteenth century, it may be identified with that pro-claimed by Price and attacked by Burke, but needs to be distinguished from the argument aboutfrequent parliaments and executive corruption emphasized here.


exercised a special appeal in dissenting and nonconformist circles, and a hundredyears later we will find this interpretation of the Revolution passionately debatedbetween Richard Price on one hand, and on the other Josiah Tucker (who con-siders Locke the apostle of the radical cause) and Edmund Burke (who does notmention him at all). What the Second Treatise cannot do is to find Locke a placein the mainstream of English radicalism: the claim to "frequent parliaments reg-ularly chosen by the people," which had been made on grounds of both naturaland historical right in the manifestos of the army, the Levellers, and the GoodOld Cause. It was this that had begun to reassert itself about 1675 and was nowbeing restated by those Goldie has identified in "The Roots of True Whiggism"- all of them Shaftesbureans, Londoners, and former associates of Locke's - inlanguage modified by the further claim that Parliament was threatened withcorruption by the executive. At the roots of True Whiggism we find the linkbetween the Good Old Cause and the eighteenth-century Commonwealthman;but just as Harrington himself can be connected with the Good Old Cause, sowe shall find the Commonwealth critique of ruling Revolution Whig-gism taken up and linked with the neo-Harringtonianism of the country Tories.Radical opposition could be Tory as well as Whig, rural as well as urban; itwould be hard to say as much for the thinking of the Treatises of Government.

Locke, therefore, must be counted a First Whig who never became a TrueWhig or a significant contributor to their vocabulary; nor was he an originalmember of that "Whig canon" of seventeenth-century writers whom CarolineRobbins identified as the pantheon of the Commonwealthmen. This will becomeevident as we study the next phase of the formation of True or Old Whiggism;before we do so, however, an attempt must be made to fix his ideological role.Locke's career as a theorist and literary activist in the 1680s, it is evident, wasvery different from what it was in the 1690s, and the anonymous publication ofthe Treatises looks like an end rather than a beginning. Within a very short timehe published the Letter Concerning Toleration and the Essay on Human Understanding(he even admitted authorship of the latter), and it is here, as well as in hiswritings on religion and his Reasonableness of Christianity, that his contribution toWhig culture - to say nothing of his true greatness as a mind - may best befound. If we adopt the perspective, mentioned earlier, that presents the Revolu-tion as a move to stop James II from preempting Whig positions, and tolerationas the Whig riposte to indulgence, the two most solid achievements of the Rev-olution Whigs must seem, first, that they retained Dissenter support and neverlost it to the Jacobites, and second, that following the departure of the nonjurorsthey were able to create a latitudinarian episcopate that induced a sufficient num-ber of the recalcitrant clergy to underwrite them. As the philosopher of tolera-tion, Locke really was a pillar of the Whig order, which came to pair his namewith that of Hoadly, while the epistemology of the Essay was clearly of incalcu-lable if ambivalent importance in establishing that religiosity of the sociable man


that we have seen to be the central theme of the latitudinarian counterrevolu-tion.46 Here, it may some day be agreed, were Locke's true accomplishments asan ideologue as well as a philosopher; the Treatises of Government, when recognizedas his, were swept along in the wake of this mighty work in a manner that hasmade their radicalism (which was not the radicalism of the next seventy years)hard to recognize. It was Locke's pupil the third earl of Shaftesbury who thoughthis work as a moralist subversive unless carried further in the direction of socia-bility.

II. From the Financial Revolution to the ScottishEnlightenment

The next phase in the formation of an opposition ideology may be examined inthe light of several events occurring about 1698: a moment, like 1675 or 1680-2, when a number of distinguishable threads came together to create a new pat-tern. As prelude it must be stated that William III, little as he may have reflectedon what he was doing, is a revolutionary actor in the history of British monarchy.He obliged his new kingdoms to reorganize their military, financial, and politicalstructures in order to achieve effective participation in continental and imperialwarfare, and this is an important precondition of the formation of Whig oligarchyat the end of the reign succeeding his own. To Goldie's True Whigs in theaftermath of the Revolution we need impute no more than disappointment thatfeatures of the Exclusionist program were not being adopted; but the radicals of1698 confronted the regime of the Junto Whigs and the powerful institutionsthat had been built up to conduct the Nine Years' War. The establishment ofthe Bank of England in 1694 had laid the foundations of that edifice of publiccredit which was to be incessantly debated until well after the French Revolution,but the most prominent theme of the 1698 polemic was the reduction of Wil-liam's army. A Scot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, and two Anglo-Irishmen, JohnToland and John Trenchard, held forth on the vices of a standing army and thevirtues of a militia, and this was to be of significance in the ideological history ofall three kingdoms. Trenchard is a key figure in the history of neo-Harringtonianthinking; it is becoming usual to present the Scottish Enlightenment as a seriesof replies to positions taken by Fletcher; and though Toland did not here writein an Anglo-Irish context, Viscount Molesworth in Dublin had published hisAccount of Denmark and William Molyneux was about to publish his Case of Ire-land's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England^1 — a work filled with Lockean

4 6 A Marxis t analysis of the Essay may be found in Nea l W o o d , The Politics of Locke's Philosophy: A

Social Study of "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (Berkeley, 1983) .4 7 For b o t h these see R o b b i n s , Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, p p . 88—108, 1 3 4 - 4 3 - T h e char-

acter of Irish Whiggism might repay study at even greater length.


doctrine that Locke was obliged to disown and At wood to castigate. The paperwar of 1698 enlarges our subject into a British context and establishes themesthat were to preoccupy the American mind.

The neo-Harringtonian reading of history was given its definitive form inFletcher's Discourse of Government in Relation to Militias; the reading with whichthe Whig regime was to counter it obtained its first formulation in the replyDaniel Defoe directed against both Fletcher and Trenchard.48 Fletcher locatedthe Harringtonian ideal of armed civic virtue in a Gothic and medieval pastwhose feudal character he played down; he presented the rise of commerce andenlightenment at the end of the Middle Ages as phenomena admirable in them-selves but entailing specialization and the loss of liberty as the freeholders per-mitted themselves to be defended and governed by professionals, who necessarilyexploited and corrupted them. Defoe asserted that a society built on militaryservice and tenure was not only feudal but baronial, uncultivated, violent, andrepressive; true freedom was modern and could cnly be found in commercialsociety, where the individual might profit by wealth and enlightenment and didnot risk his liberty in paying others to defend and govern himr so long as heretained parliamentary control of the purse strings. The defense of the Whigregime was beginning to find the once Tory feudal interpretation of medievalhistory usable for its purposes. In this debate neither side made any allusion toLocke — it is difficult to see why they should have — nor does it appear that Locke(who was still living) expressed any interest in it. The confrontation of Fletcherwith Defoe supplies an antithesis between virtue and commerce, republicanismand liberalism, classicism and progressivism. The Old Whigs identified freedomwith virtue and located it in a past; the Modern Whigs identified it with wealth,enlightenment, and progress toward a future. Around this antithesis, it is nottoo much to say, nearly all eighteenth-century philosophy of history can be or-ganized, though it is obvious that in cultures other than the British, somethingother than Whig parliamentarism must be located as the precipitating cause; inFrance, perhaps, one could point to the growth of an enlightened court culture,with philosophic academies and gens de lettres in dialogue with absolute mon-archy.49 Nor must it ever be forgotten that, as the debate progressed during thenext century, virtually every participant showed himself deeply aware of the val-ues propounded by the opposing party. There can be no greater mistake than toturn this debate into a straw man by presenting it as a simple eristic, and nothingmore like a "Whig interpretation" than to render the eighteenth century theprogressive triumph of the Modern Whigs over their opponents.

The terms "Old Whig" and "Modern Whig" appear about this time in thesatirical dialogues of Charles Davenant,50 who was among the first to link the

48 The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 427—36.49Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, N.J . , 1980).50The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 437-46 .


growth of standing armies with that of a "monied interest" of investors in thepublic funds. Yet Davenant's own claims to be called any kind of Whig areuncertain, and we are at the point where the debate can no longer be adequatelydescribed as one between ruling Whig politicians and their doctrinaire Old Whigcritics. The drive to disband the army came, after all, from a "country party" ledby that complex and ambivalent figure Robert Harley, and both it and he wereon their way from being something that could be called Whig to being some-thing that could be called Tory. As the discontent of the "country" (a term thatcould bear urban as well as rural meanings) acquired in its growth a plethora ofJacobite and High Church resentments against everything that had happenedsince 1688, we enter that territory in which the opposition of court and countryhas to be interwoven with that of Whig and Tory, and to which the historio-graphical catchphrase "the rage of party" is peculiarly applicable. It is also thatin which the categories Old Whig and Tory begin to penetrate one another. JohnToland claimed in after years that the edition of Harrington he prepared between1698 and 1700 had been undertaken as a service to Harley. He also dedicatedthis idealization of a gentry republic to the mayor, aldermen, and common coun-cil of the city, praising London as a Venice where Harrington had imaginedEngland as a Rome.51 Harrington, though he never said so, may have seen tradeas bringing about the emancipation of the freeholders from their lords, but Lon-don was by now the center of the "monied interest," of which he had never heard.The field of debate was not simple, and we should not hasten to resolve it.

Toland's role in the militia debate is of less significance than other activitiesin which we find him engaged.52 During the years to which his edition of Har-rington belongs, he wrote a Life of Milton, he partly rewrote and then publishedthe memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, and he was instrumental in producing thedefinitive edition of Sidney's Discourses, to which — as has been pointed out byBlair Worden, who has reestablished part of Ludlow's authentic text — we hadbetter pay close critical attention.53 Toland was in short the main actor in creat-ing what Caroline Robbins has called "the Whig canon" of seventeenth-centurywriters venerated by the eighteenth-century Commonwealthmen; to the namesjust listed those of Vane, Marvell, Neville, and Nedham were soon to be added.54

But this Whig canon was in fact a republican canon; every name upon it was thatof a Commonwealthman in the sense of a defender of the regicide government, ifnot of the regicide itself. To understand its significance we must place its creation

5 x The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 141-142.52Robbins, pp. 125-8; Margaret C. Jacob, "John Toland and the Newtonian Ideology," Journal of

the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, XXXII (1969), pp. 307-31, and works cited in nn. 18 and19, this chapter. Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations(Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

53 Bla i r W o r d e n , e d . , Edmund Ludlow: A Voycefrom the Watchtower (London , 1978) .54 R o b b i n s , Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, c h a p . I I .


alongside that of the "Whig interpretation of history," which may be seen takingshape in the years around 1700. J. P. Kenyon has emphasized how incessantlyWhigs of every stripe from the Exclusionists on were saddled with responsibilityfor the judicial murder of Charles I. The only way to escape it was to separate theparliamentary leaders from the army regicides and construct a vindication of themen of 1628 and 1641 on the grounds they themselves had alleged: that therewas an ancient constitution and that the actions of Charles I had tended to breakit. James Tyrrell, the friend of Locke, who had joined him in attacking Filmer'sPatriarcha and had encouraged William Petyt to defend the ancient constitutionagainst The Freeholder's Grand Inquest published with it, seems to have been oneof the first to see the necessity of this strategy.55 Even the publication in 1702 ofClarendon's History of the Rebellion did not inhibit its growth; Clarendon himself,after all, had behaved conformably to the Whig interpretation until the GrandRemonstrance. From Tyrrell to Rapin de Thoyras, Whig historiography was builtup from the twin foundations of the ancient constitution and a judicious defenseof Eliot, Hampden, and Pym; we all know that the myth proved very potentindeed.56 But the "republican canon," built up by Toland and other Common-weal thmen to the time of Thomas Hollis, by implication both adopted the Whiginterpretation and challenged it. It endorsed the ancient constitution and saidlittle about the "Norman yoke," but it moved beyond Parliament to Common-wealth, beyond the antiquity of Parliament to neo-Harringtonian ideas of Gothicliberty; it also implicitly endorsed the regicide of 1649, from which Whig his-toriography was a sustained attempt to deflect attention.57 Toland was the archi-vist and to some extent the myth maker of English republican theory.

He appears also as a leading activist of radical deism, the promoter in Englandand abroad of various secret societies that look like gathered congregations ofilluminist rationalism. One of the dedicatees of his Harrington, the city magnateSir Robert Clayton, was a leader of the established structure of English freema-sonry at a time when Toland was seeking to organize hermetic groups within it.The ideological implications of this have been worked out by Margaret Jacob.58

Religious unorthodoxy of any kind had obvious anticlerical connotations, andthese were the years in which the church was most alarmed by the spread of whatit called deism. But there was a profound if elusive difference between a "rationalreligion," however undogmatic, that supported the Whig latitudinarian ideal of

55 A full-length study of Tyrrell would be worth having; there is J. W. Gough, "James Tyrrell, WhigHistorian and Friend of John Locke," Historical Journal XIX, 3 (1976), pp. 581-610. His GeneralHistory of Englandbegan appearing in 1696.

56There may well have been more "Tory" than "Whig" historians of seventeenth-century eventsduring these years; we are dealing with three dominant interpretations.

57 There is overlap here; many Whigs maintained "Calves' Head" attitudes and displayed copies ofCharles I's death warrant, but such endorsements were more private than public.

58See works cited in nn. 18 and 52, this chapter.


a rational piety practiced within society and amenable to its authority, and a"religion of reason," or worse still "of nature," that offered to make the boldspirit master of its thinking in this world and denied the separateness of the next.The latter smacked of republicanism - though Toland and his friends were inretreat from the forum into the lodge — and of enthusiasm, albeit one of priscatheologia rather than biblical prophecy. There is a skepticism that tolerantly ac-cepts the clergy and another that angrily proposes to disestablish them. Whatthis distinction means is made very clear in the histories written by suchthoroughgoing philosophes as Hume and Gibbon, not that even they are unequiv-ocal about it.

Between the Treaties of Rijswijk (1697) and Utrecht (1713), opposition polemicin England was directed against the regime that conducted the War of the Span-ish Succession: a regime presented as a system of public credit and national debt,maintaining an ever-expanding professional army and parliamentary patronage,which waged and won great wars abroad but was held to pay for itself by impos-ing a land tax on the freeholders and gentry. However exact or inexact this de-scription, the regime bears witness to the profound transformation in Britishpolitics brought about by involvement in the wars against France; the expansionof imperial power was made possible by devices that tended to the stabilizationof parliamentary rule, and before the political crisis of 1710—15 we see the alli-ance of Godolphin and Marlborough with the Junto Whigs as anticipating theWhig oligarchy and the imperial parliamentarism of the Hanoverian reigns. Thepolemic against the wartime regime therefore presents itself as continuous withthe polemic against parliamentary oligarchy, and we have looked back to thebeginnings of the Commonwealth tradition to substantiate the Robbins thesisthat this polemic was continuously conducted by Old, True, and IndependentWhig critics of the Whig regime, revealing a sharp schism in Whig politicalculture. We shall see that this thesis can be, and indeed must be, maintained;yet we must now confront the problem that during the reign of Anne the polemicagainst the Whig monied interest - the alliance of urban dissent with greatfinancial and military interests — was conducted by Tories, that is, by adherentsof a country party that claimed to speak for the rural gentry and was moved bytheir discontents into High Churchmanship and the borderlands of Jacobitism.This was territory into which radical deists and republicans of the Toland stripecould not follow, and old Commonwealthmen and supporters of frequent parlia-ments are to be found in due course reluctantly endorsing the Septennial Act of1716 as the only means of rendering the Jacobites harmless.59 We might con-59 Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 109-10; Sullivan, John Toland, pp. 37, 142,

153—57, doubts Toland's reluctance.


elude from this that the heirs of Shaftesbury and Neville had lost control of theirneo-Harringtonian ideology to its natural proprietors, the self-appointed mouth-pieces of the country gentry; yet so long as the lineage established in TheEighteenth-Century Commonwealthman stands, this cannot be uncritically accepted.The relationships between urban and rural, and also (but not interchangeably)Commonwealth and Tory, elements in opposition polemic and ideology requirea good deal more investigation.

The polemic of Anne's reign was directed against the monied interest: againsta speculative society typified less by merchants - always figures of relative benig-nity — than by the stockjobbers, political adventurers, and investors in the publicfunds whose tense, grubby, avid faces begin to appear in caricature. The gener-alization has been ventured60 that since by now property was acknowledged asthe social basis of personality, the emergence of classes whose property consistednot of land or goods or even bullion, but of paper promises to repay in an unde-fined future, was seen as entailing the emergence of new types of personality,unprecedentedly dangerous and unstable. Hence the imagery of Credit as a femaleand hysterical figure, and (shared by Addison and Montesquieu) of the bags ofgold that prove to be only bags of wind.61 To all this the Roman mythologyfavored by a number of traditions, including the Harringtonian, offered a galleryof countertypes: self-mastered, stoic, public, and agrarian, whether called fromthe plow like Cincinnatus or retiring like Cicero to Tusculan philosophic leisure;Cato in all his manifestations the arch figure. The Whigs of the regime, at whomso much of this was aimed, strove to annex the Roman ideal to their own cause,and there was plenty in the Ciceronian ethos of negotium and officium that favoredtheir doing so; Reed Browning has written a remarkable study of "Court Whig"thought as fundamentally Ciceronian.62 But what was above all needed was adefense of urban life and politics as neither an ancient polis nor a faeces Romuli —a financial and military regime based, as both Fletcher and Defoe had realized,on a decisive abandonment of the classical (and at the same time Gothic) ideal ofthe citizen as armed proprietor, and his replacement by a leisured, cultivated,and acquisitive man who paid for others to defend and govern him. This couldnot be defended in Greco-Roman terms. Rather, it called for an understandingof commercial modernity, and the vindication of the regime entailed an opposi-tion between ancient and modern, resembling if not identical with that currentlygoing on in the "battle of the books." Whig ideology now took a decisive turntoward social, cultural, and commercial values, one we associate especially withthe name of Addison, among a group of great contending literary figures whowere at the same time party journalists and cultivated essayists, catering in bothcapacities to a new urban public of the readers of periodicals. In reply to the Old

60See chap. VI of the present volume. 61Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 452 -7 , 475.62 Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982).


Whigs and their Tory inheritors there appears a new category, which we mayterm that of the "polite Whigs."

The ideal of politeness had first appeared in the Restoration, where it formedpart of the latitudinarian campaign to replace prophetic by sociable religiosity.This campaign is carried on by Addison, a sound churchman by the new Whigstandards, whose supreme achievement we see as the advancement of a politestyle, and so of a politics of style accompanied by a morality of politeness.63 Thepolemic against enthusiasm was to continue for another hundred years - so deepwere the scars of the Puritan interregnum on the governing-class mind — and theconcepts of politeness, manners, and taste were to remain integral parts of itsstrategy. It is important to notice, however, that they could be directed at othertargets. Satire against curmudgeonly old dons out of Anthony Wood could easilybecome polemic against Oxford clerical Toryism, while across the Channel thedeist philosophes were seeking to substitute manners for religion as the key to thehistory of mankind. In Whig England, moreover, Addisonian politeness had afurther set of adversaries. It could be used against the uncouth virtue of theSpartans and Romans — of Cato the Elder, with his distrust of all philosophers —being exalted by the neo-Harringtonian critics of the regime, and against theradical deists with whom some of them still associated. Politeness and enlighten-ment were irenic, established, and oligarchic ideals, capable of being employedagainst Puritan, Tory, and republican alike and of making them look curiouslysimilar.

Placed in a counter-Harringtonian context, the ethos of politeness is seen tomake an appeal to that historical movement discussed by both Fletcher and De-foe, in which the rise of commerce and culture had led to the replacement of thearmed citizen by the leisured taxpayer under parliamentary government. But theexaltation of politeness is not just a way of saying that the acquisition of cultureis worth the price; in the Spectator essays, politeness becomes an active civilizingagent. By observation, conversation, and cultivation, men and women are broughtto an awareness of the needs and responses of others and of how they appear inthe eyes of others; this is not only the point at which politeness becomes a highlyserious practical morality, reinforced by an obviously Lockean epistemology, al-though just at this point Shaftesbury thought Lockean doctrine needed to beenlarged by a doctrine of sympathy. It is also the point at which Addison beginsto comment on the structure of English society and the reconciliation of its diverse"interests." In the Spectator circle, Sir Roger the country gentleman and SirAndrew the urban merchant meet and polish one another, and Mr. Spectatorcomments on the merits and shortcomings of each. His observation is his prac-

63 Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Joseph Addison's Sociable Animal: In the Market Place, on theHustings, in the Pulpit (Providence, R.I. , 1971) remains a convenient summary of Addisonian ide-ology. See also James Leheny's introduction to his edition of The Freeholder (Oxford, 1979).


tice; by observing his friends he heightens their awareness of self and other, andthis sociable role is more important, both morally and socially, than any he couldplay as a politically engaged activist.

The Spectator circle also stands for what was coming to be called "the Town,"the leisured urban environment spreading west from the old centers of West-minster and London as the result of the growth of the parliamentary aristocracyand the rentier classes; it was not the ferociously expanding London (also some-times called "the Town") of Defoe, Hogarth, and Fielding. It is the setting inwhich gentleman and merchant meet to learn politeness, and at the end of thelater Freeholder essays the loutish Tory squire, the Foxhunter, is brought to Townand taught the blessings of trade and the Protestant succession - which hadintervened in emblematic form in the Vision of Credit at the outset of the Spec-tator series, and had caused the bags of wind to be filled with gold again. TheTown was replacing the court as the meeting point of country and city; Macau-lay's famous chapter on the bumpkin backwardness of the rural gentry and clergyis simply an extension of the Addisonian doctrine that an urbane and suburbanWhiggism was necessary to teach church and country the culture without whichthey would be unable to exercise their liberty. Whiggism of the polite kind hadno need of the Puritan, Tory, or republican virtues; the ideological importanceof secular culture was a Whig, and paradoxically also an Anglican, creation.

There was as we shall see a Scottish component in Macaulay's thinking. PoliteWhiggism gains meaning when read in the context of Defoe's reply to Fletcherof Saltoun, and Nicholas Phillipson, George Davie, and others have developedan interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment that locates its beginnings in theneed to find alternatives to the values expressed in Fletcher's speeches opposingthe form taken by the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707.64 There are two respects inwhich the union is crucial to the formation of the Whig regime of the eighteenthcentury. It originated in an urgent Scottish desire to take part in the economicgrowth fostered by the new financial and military power of the southern king-dom, and because it took the form of an incorporation of the two parliaments, itensured that the managers of patronage both controlled the politics of Scotlandand enlarged the ministerial interest at Westminster. This accounts for the bitterdislike of Scotsmen in British affairs expressed by such critics of the comingoligarchy as Jonathan Swift, Charles Churchill, and Thomas Jefferson. AndrewFletcher, however, based his opposition to the incorporating union on valuesmore simply civic-humanist and neo-Harringtonian. He ardently desired mod-

^Nicholas Phillipson^ "Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment," in City and Society inthe Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto, 1973); "Culture and Society in theEighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment," in TheUniversity in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, N.J., 1974); "The Scottish Enlightenment,"in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge, 1981). G.E. Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment (London, 1981).


ernization of the Scottish economy — he had after all been a promoter of theDarien Scheme, the equivalent of the English South Sea Bubble - but he no lessardently desired that the moral consequences of commerce and culture should becontrolled by the disciplined virtue that only the maintenance of autonomouspolitical and military institutions could preserve for Scotland. He therefore de-sired a federative union, with a regional parliament and militia. The programwas politically foredoomed, but it is the contention of Phillipson and Davie thatthe values it expressed enjoyed such resonance that some alternative to them mustbe found. Scottish lay and clerical thinkers therefore set about denning a moralityin which virtue might be shown arising from sources in society, culture, andcommerce, and existing independently of the practice of autonomous politics.

The provincial elites of postunion Edinburgh, it is contended - juristic, land-owning, mercantile, academic, clerical - can be seen founding a series of evi-dently Addisonian societies, dedicated to the furtherance of sociability, conver-sation, and moral and economic improvement. Though the combination is un-mistakably Whig, it is the emphasis on the last that is distinctively Scottish;because in Scotland there was no Tory landed interest, but only Jacobites, High-landers, Borderers, and a past remembered as more barbarous than it probablyhad been,65 the Whig belief that conversation and commerce go together mergedwith a perception of economic improvement as immediately superimposed uponfeudal, agnatic, and hunter-warrior states of society. This perception sensiblyquickened after the Highland rebellion of 1745; but long before that, Addiso-nian, latitudinarian, Arminian, and Lockean theories of morality, religion, andsociability found themselves in a more direct confrontation than could possiblyoccur in England with the heavily armored Calvinism of the late Covenantingperiod. Here too the collision between modernity and tradition was more acutethan anything known in the southern kingdom, though the rise of the Moderatefaction among the Edinburgh clergy did much to cushion it; and finally, therather rapid advent of an enlightened morality merged with a Scottish traditionof study in the Roman civil law, itself turning, under Arminian influences in theDutch universities, which Scotsmen attended in numbers, toward the analysis ofjurisprudence in terms of manners, morals, and sociability. So distinctively Scot-tish is this last that Duncan Forbes and Peter Stein have found it possible todescribe the Scottish Enlightenment in terms of the modernization of juris-prudence and ethics, with minimal reference to the need to overcome a neo-Harringtonian critique of the Whig commercial order.66 Indeed, the relativeabsence in Scotland of anything like the conjunction of Tory and Commonwealth-

65 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 14'/70-1625 (Toronto, 1981).66Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1976); Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The

Story of an Idea (Cambridge, 1980). See the present writer's "Cambridge Paradigms and ScotchPhilosophers," in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983).


man in England may raise the question whether one Fletcher of Saltoun is enoughto make a republican antitradition. It can be affirmed that the Moderate clergyand Whig lay elites of Edinburgh and elsewhere developed a powerful series oftheses regarding the history of society, the psychological foundations of moralsand aesthetics, and in due course political economy. These formed an ideologicalvindication of the Union of 1707, and when they moved south with David Hume,they took the form that Forbes has called "scientific Whiggism"67 and that inEngland encountered a diversity of antagonists.

From the Hanoverian succession of 1714 we are accustomed to date the ratherrapid establishment of the "Whig oligarchy" or "supremacy," which may havebeen the outcome of long-term social processes but on the evenementiel level ap-pears to us — as it did to the next generation — associated with such highlyspecific legislative measures as the Septennial Act of 1716 and the ultimatelyabandoned yet significant Peerage Bill of 1719. The lengthening of the durationof parliaments made possible a series oipactes de famille that were rapidly to makecontested elections a good deal less common in counties and even in boroughs;we tend to see this as the effective disfranchisement of the borough electorateswhich for so much of the preceding century it had been the inclination of thegentry to strengthen, involve, and enlarge. The shrinkage of local influence couldonly weaken those families excluded from government patronage, and even zpactede famille that might preserve a seat in Tory hands paid a price for it in the lossof ability to challenge a government by forcing a contest. Stamped with thesuspicion of Jacobitism and demoralized by the loss of their leaders, the Torygentry so conspicuous in 1709—14 rapidly dwindled into an authentically Jaco-bite rump of uncertain size, or were forced to make their peace with a series ofWhig patronage masters if they desired to exhibit anything more than the passivevirtue of independent country gentlemen. This perception of politics68 has beenchallenged by twentieth-century research, which queries the extent to which pa-tronage was centralized in a few identifiable hands, and by more recent worksthat maintain the active role of the Tories until 1745 or 1756; but it was quitewidely shared by observers and critics of the Hanoverian regime in all threekingdoms. There was believed to exist a Whig "oligarchy" or "supremacy," the

6 7 Forbes , Hume's Philosophical Politics; for t he shaded differences be tween "scept ica l" and "scientific

W h i g g i s m , " see discussion later in this section.6 8 T h e representative works on this subject are P l u m b , Growth of Political Stability; W . A. Speck,

Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 (Cambr idge , Mass . , 1977); H . T . Dickinson, Liberty and

Property: Political Ideologies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977). The two lat ter authors

advocate the view that a court-country replaced a Tory-Whig polarity about 1714.


effective dictatorship of a single if minimally organized party using as its instru-ment a parliament so far sovereign that it had prolonged its own duration withoutreference to the electorate.

The alliance of forces that established the Whig regime was that which hadconducted the War of the Spanish Succession and had been attacked with all theresources of the polemic against a monied interest said to use war as a means ofexpanding its credit, its patronage, and its parliamentary and military power.Much of this polemic could be carried on even when the new oligarchy hadadopted a policy of peace and French alliance; even though the South Seas Com-pany was a Tory foundation with many Tory directors, the polemic against themonied interest could be directed against the Whig ministers who intervened tosave the public credit. This polemic could be Old Whig as easily as it could beTory, and there now appeared to give it an effective voice that founding fatheramong Commonwealthmen John Trenchard, who until his death in 1724 con-ducted Cato's Letters and The Independent Whig, with Thomas Gordon as his coad-jutor and his successor.69 The former journal took parliamentary corruption as itschief target; the latter was directed against the alliance of Whig politicians withthe established church and was anticlerical enough to be widely read and imitatedin America, especially when one colony or another was active in opposing thethreat of a crown-supported episcopacy.70 It was also translated into French andpublished by Holbach; deists and Old Whigs continued to figure in the EuropeanEnlightenment.

The greatest of all polemics, however, against the regime consolidated andtypified by Sir Robert Walpole was Tory to the extent that it was orchestratedby Bolingbroke, and High Church and even Catholic to the extent that it in-volved Swift, Atterbury, and Pope. There are many problems here crucial to theunderstanding of eighteenth-century ideological history. What so outspoken adeist as Bolingbroke had been doing at the head of an Anglican party in Anne'sreign is a question that seems to transcend any answer (however justified) in termsof political duplicity. The grandfather of Edward Gibbon was a city Tory andSouth Seas Company director, and his family at Putney seems to have includedtwo men of intellect: William Law, the nonjuring mystic, and David Mallet, thedeist and Bolingbroke's literary executor.71 This sharp dualism — oligarchy makes69For them see Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 115-24; Pocock, The Machiavel-

lian Moment, pp. 467—77; Isaac F. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia inthe Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 2 4 3 - 5 1 .

70 See Milton M. Klein, ed., The Independent Reflector . . . by William Livingston and others (Cambridge,Mass., 1963). The Holbach translation is entitled L'Esprit du Clerge and is dated 1765; see FrankManuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).

71 Michel Baridon, Gibbon et le My the de Rome: Histoire et Ideologie au Siecle des Lumieres (these presenteedevant l'Universite de Paris VII; Lille, Service de Reproduction des Theses, 1975), vol. I, pp. 23-6, 39-42; Patricia Craddock, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters (Baltimore, 1982), pp. 8 -9, 24, 36, 51, 87, 126.


strange bedfellows — may be associated with another, inherent in the character ofthe Craftsman, conducted by Bolingbroke and Pulteney, and in the Dissertationupon Parties and Remarks on the History of England, works by Bolingbroke thatgrew out of it. These were recognized by contemporaries as constituting a countrycampaign, a polemic designed to drive Walpole from power by mobilizing a"public opinion" that should include the independent country gentlemen stillsupposed to be an essential component of the political order. As such, they mar-shalled all the neo-Harringtonian arguments familiar to us since at least 1675:the danger of an executive ascendancy employing patronage and finance as meansof corruption; the need for Parliament to be independent of the executive, and tothis end composed of independent proprietors; the importance of landed evenmore than mercantile property in ensuring personal and parliamentary indepen-dence; and the need to return to the principles of an ancient constitution in whichall these truisms had been institutionalized. Bolingbroke also, in The Idea of aPatriot King, engaged in the "Leicester House" maneuver becoming frequent withpoliticians out of power: He imagined a successor to the throne who shouldhimself take the lead in rendering Parliament independent of ministe-rial and oligarchic control. However unimportant this "idea" may have been inshaping the conduct of George III before or after 1760, it played a real part inshaping others' perceptions of his conduct.

But the public opinion to which this printed polemic was addressed was nec-essarily made up of those in a position to read books and journals printed inLondon, and though an increasingly effective circulation industry might conveythese views to a country public for whom they were intended, we must supposethat they had an urban public as well. This in turn might consist largely of recentarrivals, seasonal visitors, and suburban residents drawn to the Town by politics,business, and pleasure, while retaining much of the country outlook they hadbrought with them; but under the conditions presupposed by the thesis of Whigoligarchy, we must also take account of a longer-established city population,whose participation in politics and satisfaction by it were no longer what theyhad been in the days before the Septennial Act. To the real or fancied exclusionof country gentry by parliamentary oligarchs and the monied interest, we haveto add that of borough electorates effectively disfranchised after 1714, and thecrucial problem we now face is that of the relative significance of the ideologiesgenerated by these two groups or offered to them.

Marxist and marxisant historians retain an apparently ineradicable allegiance tothe idea of the rising bourgeoisie or middle class, without which, it seems -though one may want to ask why - not only their classical system but their entireway of thinking would disintegrate. They feel obliged to explain all social op-position or radical thought in preindustrial eighteenth-century Britain — unlessit can be dismissed as "traditional" or outright "reactionary" — as the ideology of


a bourgeoisie, to be contrasted with that of an aristocracy that must be shown tohave been feudal, paternalist, or hierarchical; this bourgeois radicalism must fur-ther be integrated with a "liberal" possessive individualism associated as closelyas possible with the name of Locke, who has become a necessary actor in theirscheme of things. Historians of this persuasion have been offended by the sug-gestion that radicalism in the eighteenth century consisted largely of a polemicagainst a system of public credit dominated by a landed aristocracy, that it wasconducted largely in the name of classical-republican and agrarian-military val-ues, and that it was in the defense of the Whig aristocracy that an ethos ofcommercial individualism was first elaborated. Although none of these proposi-tions would have disturbed Marx and Engels as much as they do their succes-sors,72 the latter have cast about for ways of depriving them of their force. IsaacF. Kramnick,73 for whom every diminution of the role of Locke is an implicitattack on Marx and every criticism of the concept of bourgeois ideology an attackon that of ideology itself, has hit upon the strategy of representing all radicalismof the foregoing kind as reflecting the consciousness of an excluded country gen-try, and all claims for republican virtue and independence as reflecting this gen-try's "nostalgia" for an ordered, hierarchical, and paternalist society in whichothers were dependent on them. The republican critique thus shifted unthreaten-ingly into the reactionary column, the way is clear for the emergence in the lateeighteenth century of an essentially Lockean "bourgeois radicalism," a termKramnick reiterates with all the fervor and unction of one testifying to the old-time religion. A more sophisticated version of the same thesis may be that putforward by E. P. Thompson, who accepts the view that the governing classesbecome deeply divided during a period with 1714 as one of its turning points;Thompson seems to contend, however, that the excluded fragment offered anideology of paternal protection in opposition to the governing fragment's tech-niques of patronage and direct control.74 Both these contentions operate by rep-resenting country and Commonwealth criticisms of the Whig order as the ideo-logical tools of a Tory gentry, and by minimizing that duality of Tory and Old

72 As is made clear at various points in R. S. Neale , Class in English History (Oxford, 1981).73 K r a m n i c k , Bolingbroke and His Circle; "Rel ig ion and Radical ism: English Political Theory in the

Age of Revo lu t ion , " Political Theory V , 4 (1977) , p p . 5 0 3 - 3 4 , and "Republ ican Revisionism Re-vis i ted ," American Historical Review LXXXV'II , 3 (1982) , p p . 629—64. Despi te some k ind words inthe first footnote of the lat ter art icle, I consider the alliterative incantat ion that forms its t i t le aclear indicat ion tha t an or thodoxy is about to be reestablished; the word "revis ionism" is synony-m o u s w i th heresy. Joyce O . Appleby likewise tends to regard any diversion of emphasis from liberalcapi tal ism as deconstruct ive of bo th English and American history; see her " W h a t is still Americanin the Political Phi losophy of Thomas Jefferson?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. , X X X I X , 2(1982), pp. 287-309- It was not and is not my intention to furnish or to demolish answers to thatquestion.

74E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social His-tory III, 2 (1978), pp. 133-65.


Whig versions of the same argument around which this essay is being built.Meanwhile a heavy blow at the nostalgia thesis, and to some extent at the

oligarchy thesis on which it rests, has been struck in the recent work of EvelineCruickshanks, Linda Colley, and J. C. D. Clark.75 These authors contend thatthe Tory party did not decline and disappear by rapid stages after 1714, butremained a stubborn, active, and surprisingly radical political alternative untilsome time after 1745. Though they are not uniformly in agreement, they takeseriously in varying degrees the contention that the Tories of these decades wereactually, or in a high state of potentiality, Jacobite, or alternatively that thecondition of politics was such that no statesman could afford to act as if Jacobi-tism were anything but a serious threat. Dr. Clark, the most methodologicallypolemical of these three scholars, further offers to carry on a version of the Namierthesis — he is critical of Namier, but for not being Namierite enough — thatinsists, first, that eighteenth-century politics were oligarchic, at least in the sensethat the game of high politics is played according to rules intelligible only tothose playing it; and second, that in the politics of oligarchy - indeed in allpolitics insofar as they are high politics - ideology and the rhetoric of issue,principle, and abuse have little or no place. A consequence for his argument isthat though he indicates some scorn for the concept of Whig oligarchy, this scornis reserved for those - as they might be G. O. Trevelyan or E. P. Thompson -who employ the term as one of condemnation and identify oligarchy with corrup-tion.76 He insists a Voutrance on the oligarchic character of politics and merelydefers the advent of oligarchy without party from the years after 1714 to thoseafter 1745, a move of greater narrative than interpretative importance (Clarkusefully insists on the superiority of narrative over interpretation).77 The returnof Tories and Jacobites to center stage, supposedly the principal modification ofthe accounts of history given by Namier and Plumb, thus tends paradoxically toreinforce these historians' accounts of what eighteenth-century politics were likeas a structure.

Clark lays great emphasis on the point that the players in the game of highpolitics are seldom much activated by their perceptions of the general issuesimplicit in the game's existence, least of all by the issues apparent to those whoare critical of the existence of high politics or of high politics in their existingform. To the extent to which the players constitute an effective oligarchy, theycan afford to ignore ideological issues, especially those used to question whetheroligarchy should exist at all; if the issues, having been articulated, are admittedto a role in the game, they are admitted only by the action of one or more of the

75 Eveline Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (London, 1979); Linda Colley,In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-60 (Cambridge, 1982); J. C. D. Clark, The Dynamicsof Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and English Party (Cambridge, 1982).

76Clark, Dynamics of Change, p. 458, n. 1. 7 7Ibid., pp. 18-19.


players, themselves motivated by their playing of the game. When issues andideology appear in eighteenth-century politics, they tend to acquire a local, tac-tical, and oligarchic significance; some oligarch allows them to be heard, forpurposes of his own. We should study this kind of perlocutionary force, ratherthan the ideological implications of the generalized utterances we hear.

To the extent to which this is true - and it must be true to a high degree ifthe term "oligarchy" is to be appropriate - two consequences follow. We mustbeware of supposing that the actors in high politics were motivated by the thingsthey said, and we must beware of supposing that the categories of ideologicalrhetoric necessarily furnish either reliable description or reliable evaluation of theway the institution of high politics worked. The historian of ideology, however,is not necessarily making either of these suppositions, though there is a conven-tion of taking it for granted that he is. Clark stresses that the game was extraor-dinarily hard for the players to describe, even to one another — in the words ofJohn Nance Garner, "politics is funny" — and that therefore the language of thespectators was bound to be inadequate as a description of the game. He quotesDodington78 on the difference between bystanders, who can see only the backs ofthe cards, and players, who can see the markings. But those excluded from agame in which they are being governed are talking not merely about how thegame is being played, but also about the fact that they are being excluded fromit;79 the fact that their awareness of the former is false does not mean that theyhave not something to say about the latter, or that what they have to say (even iffalse) is not an effective way of acting on their exclusion. Clark is not absolutist,any more than were the politicians he studies (though it seems only a matter oftime before some genius informs us that absolute monarchy reached its heightin England during the reign of George II). He does not think that the languageworld of high politics was altogether hermetic and unaccountable; it was a shib-boleth with the men of letters they read that the ultimate foundation of govern-ment was in opinion. He very rightly emphasizes that outside the closed circle ofhigh politics, there were social areas in which people were intensely aware ofwhat might be going on within the circle and employed, in the attempt tocharacterize it, language and terminology in many ways drawn from the gameitself; nor does Clark altogether preclude the possibility that this language mightin turn counterpenetrate the circle and be employed within it. He quotes from

78Ibid., p. 11.79"The minds of leading Whigs," says Clark (ibid., p. 4), "were dominated not by a canon of Whig

doctrine drawn from the great seventeenth-century tradition - Harrington, Tyrrell, Moyle, Tren-chard, Toland, Sidney and the rest - but by the practical details and daily techniques of theirtrades." The whole point of post-Robbins writing has been that this is true. The "canon of doctrine"was used by discontented Whigs to indict leading Whigs and the practice of their "trades" — andoccasionally by leading Whigs to embarrass one another. Dr. Clark denies what has not beensignificantly affirmed.


governing-class sources well aware that there was such a thing as popular opinionand another such thing as press agitation, and although he shows that the rulerslooked on both as irrelevant and offensive — imprudent and unnecessary corporatevenalities — except insofar as they could be created and managed (as they oftenwere) by high politicians, he displays his sources' awareness that they might notalways be able to manage them.80 This is why eighteenth-century fears of revo-lution regularly took a Catilinarian form; some member of the inner circle mightbetray his class. In the end, as we shall see, Catiline was a paper tiger; somethingelse happened. But the criticism of oligarchy is not to be studied as a descriptionof oligarchy but rather as one of its products, one furthermore that oligarchy doesnot always succeed in absorbing and that may in the long run have something todo with how oligarchy is modified. At this point narrative recedes and interpre-tation must step forward.

There is a rhetoric by whose means Outs - who are insiders - become Ins;there is a rhetoric that outsiders use to comment on insiders and on how the latterkeep them out. In Hanoverian England these rhetorics not infrequently coin-cided, but even when it is necessary to distinguish between them - as Clarkwishes to emphasize — the rhetoric of outsiders is worth studying as part of theirpolitical culture, whether or not it is the speech of men in power. In that societywe note a rhetoric used by Tory oppositions, highly coincident as regards contentwith a rhetoric, often Old Whig in derivation and audience, that may have givenvoice to the discontent of urban populations diminished in importance by theSeptennial Act. We encounter yet again the problem that Tory language, whichought to have been and often was High Church and Jacobite, ought not to havebeen but often was radical and republican, Commonwealth as well as country.There are Jacobite manifestos of 1745 that sound not unlike Monmouth's mani-festos of 1685.81 Indeed, Linda Colley, in a lecture published independentlyof her book, has contended that the story of "English radicalism before Wilkes"is to be found in the continuity of Toryism between 1714 and 1760.82 But it isan essential part of the argument that this Toryism was if anything more urbanthan rural, that without ceasing to ascribe discontent to elements of the countrygentry it gave a voice to those city and borough populations who found that thegreat financiers and the parliamentary oligarchs were depriving them of power.

80Clark, ibid., pp. 3-4, 12-15. See in particular p. 12, where a pamphleteer writes, "It is thecontroversy itself which is the SIN."

81F. J. McLynn, "Issues and Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745," The Eighteenth Century: Theoryand Interpretation XXIII, 2 (1982), pp. 97-133. Mr. McLynn's facts may be studied to advantageby those who do not accept his conclusions.

82 Linda Colley, "Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes," Transactions of the RoyalHistorical Society, 5th ser., 31 (1981), pp. 1-20. See also Robert M. Zaller, "The Continuity ofBritish Radicalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Eighteenth-Century Life VI, 2-3(1981), pp. 17-38.


Marie Peters has reminded us how much of the basis of William Pitt's Londonpopularity was Tory and how many of these Tories joined in opposition with suchWest Indian plantation owners as the Beckford brothers and Sir John Phillips;83

anything less nostalgic, hierarchic, or paternalist than a West India London ald-erman of the 1750s would be hard indeed to imagine. Marxists of the simplerkind will at this point toss their usual double-headed penny and proclaim thatinsofar as Tory rhetoric spoke for the country opposition it was nostalgic (so theywere right after all), and insofar as it spoke for the urban opposition it wasbourgeois (so they were right after all). The difficulty about this move is that itdoes not tell us why the same rhetoric served to articulate opposite systems ofvalues, and this cannot be done by appealing to the common sophism that it doesnot matter what people say because the Marxist knows what they mean. Those ofus who believe not only that people's language articulates their experience, butalso that it has something to tell us about what that experience was, will have toresume our researches. Meanwhile it is clear that if a country-Commonwealthlanguage could articulate urban discontents, there was less need to wait for aLockean individualist language in which to do it; what role a Lockean languagemight play remains to be seen. It is also clear that if discontented groups incountry and borough society chose to employ republican, classical, and nostalgic(meaning past-oriented) language in attacking an oligarchy of great landownersand great investors, a modernist, commercial, and polite language might beemployed (as we have begun to see it was) in defense of the Whig aristocraticorder. The perception goes with another, well known to Marx himself: that greatlandowners were often highly effective capitalist investors. We can see thereforethat if there was "bourgeois" criticism of the Whig aristocracy, it might wellinclude criticism of their capitalist behavior; but we cannot add that defense ofthe aristocracy was equally "bourgeois" without emptying the word of all usefulmeaning (if it has any). Our investigation must at this point turn once more tothe relations of "ancient" to "modern" in mid-century polemic, and in particularto the character of Whig modernism.

Bolingbroke and the Craftsman had argued in defense of an ancient constitution,which had ensured the independence of legislative from executive and to which areturn must be made to protect the legislative and those whom it representedfrom reduction to a corrupting dependence. The argument could be made tosupport a demand for return to more frequent parliaments, and it looked back toa neo-Harringtonian past of proprietors armed and assembling to assert their83Marie C. Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years'

War (Oxford, 1980).


liberty. In reply, Walpole's defenders had argued that liberty was not ancientbut modern, and that the past was feudal, not free. It followed that the consti-tution contained no principles to which return could be made and that its spiritwas either pragmatic and empirical, or modern and progressive.84 The latterargument had been anticipated by Defoe with his contention that liberty ap-peared only as proprietors emerged from feudal subordination and acquired throughtrade control over the movement of their own goods; at this point Defoe couldhave appealed to Locke, though there seems to be little evidence that he did. Butas the oligarchy acquired control of the executive and the power to exercise aparliamentary sovereignty of which the Septennial Act was a signal expression, itappropriated the interpretation of history that the Charles II Tory Brady had onceused to affirm royal sovereignty in the face of Parliament, and employed it tonullify the arguments with which the Queen Anne Tory Bolingbroke was chal-lenging parliamentary politics in the name of the independent proprietorship -in city, one wants to add, as well as country. The defense of oligarchy and sov-ereignty went hand in hand with that of commercial society.

A problem that assumed prominence as part of the Walpolean polemic andcounterpolemic was that of the relation between political regimes and the arts.Walpole was "Bob, the poets' foe"; nearly all the great writers of the age werehis enemies,85 and part of their extraordinarily obsessive presentation of him as amedley of clown and tyrant, Sejanus and Tiberius, was the contention that asvirtue became corrupt under his control of politics, the arts lost integrity andlanguage itself lost meaning. There is complexity and paradox here. On the onehand the qualities that the arts were thought in danger of losing were the "mod-ern" virtues of clarity, order, and good taste; on the other, the danger stemmedfrom an alleged loss of the "ancient" and Roman virtues of political indepen-dence, liberty, and self-mastery. We find reason to suppose that the apocalyptictriumph of nonsense over language at the end of Pope's Dunciad has somethingto do with a society dominated by speculators in paper promises to repay whichwill never be made good before the end of time; if property is the foundation ofpersonality, unreal property (in which nothing is owned except meaningless words)makes personalities unreal and their words meaningless. Pape Satan, pape Satanaleppe! Against this the image presented is that of Roman order, although theimagery stresses retirement from the corrupt city more than activity in a citywhose virtue is to be restored.

84This point has been adequately dealt with by Kramnick, Dickinson, Zaller, and other writers cited.85 Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature 1722-1742 (Lincoln,

Nebr., 1976); Maynard P. Mack's, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetryof Pope (Toronto, 1969) is the established interpretation of Pope's perception of literature as oppo-sition. The possibility that Pope's political writing had a positively Jacobite character is advancedby Howard Erskine-Hill, "Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time," Eighteenth-CenturyStudies XV, 2 (1981-2), pp. 123-48.


Yet the corruption of virtue was a concept carrying strong agrarian, anticom-mercial, and republican implications, and if we return, as recent Pope scholarshiphas been doing, to the hypothesis of a strong crypto-Jacobite component in thepolemic against Walpole, the dualities of eighteenth-century opposition are oncemore made manifest. Furthermore, the proposition that the arts were being cor-rupted and destroyed in a speculative Whig society was hard to reconcile withthe thesis, put forward by Fletcher and adopted by Defoe in 1698, that thegrowth of the arts was part of the growth of commercial society, and partook ofboth its benignant and its malignant characteristics. To say, as David Hume didin an early essay, that under Walpole "trade had flourished, liberty declined, andlearning gone to ruin"86 was to beg the question, posed by Hume and other Scotsin later writings, whether trade and learning did not flourish together, thusrendering the nature of liberty problematic. We have so far considered politeness,and consequently the arts, as features of an Addisonian Whig ideology; it was aparadox characteristically Humean that "the first polite prose we have was writtenby a man who is still alive (N.: Dr. Swift)."87 The paradox for which Swift stood,however, was that in attacking Walpole polite letters might be attacking theforces that had cultivated them.

There was a classical republican and humanist reply to the polite contention:that the arts, being of the nature of rhetoric, could flourish only under conditionsof public liberty and must decline under tyranny or corruption. Tacitus hadalways been an authoritative source for this argument, and Thomas Gordon'stranslation of Tacitus, which won him some European reputation, seems to havebeen employed by d'Alembert in his examination of the condition of letters inthe ancien regime.88 It is here that we encounter the problem of Augustanism.Voltaire in the Siecle de Louis XIV had argued what would certainly be a "modern"thesis if read in Whig conditions, namely, that the great periods in the historyof the arts had all occurred under strong manipulative rulers - Pericles, Augus-tus, the Medici, Louis himself — because they required peace, prosperity, andpatronage and must be bought at the price of authority. In calling HanoverianEngland "Augustan" we implicitly accept Voltaire's thesis, acquainted thoughhe was with Bolingbroke and Pope; we imply that the arts flourished under Whigoligarchy and ignore the passionate asseverations of the wits that Walpole brought

86Hume, "The Character of Sir Robert Walpole," Philosophical Works, ed. T. H. Green and T. H.Grose (London, 1882), vol. IV, p. 396. This essay was subsequently withdrawn.

87 Hume, "Of Civil Liberty," Philosophical Works, ed. Green and Grose (1875 edition), vol. Ill, p.159.

88Orest A. Ranum, "D'Alembert, Tacitus and the Political Sociology of Despotism," Transactions ofthe Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1980), sec. V, pp. 547-58 . For anenlightened nobleman who ranked Gordon with Algernon Sidney, see Franco Venturi, "Le Adven-ture del Generale Henry Lloyd," Rivista Storica Italiana XCI, 2-3 (1979), pp. 369-433, esp. p.429.


them to the point of death. Howard Weinbrot has found that in the England wecall "Augustan" the image formed of Augustus himself is preponderantly nega-tive and Tacitean; he is less the friend of Maecenas than the predecessor of Tiber-ius (and by implication of Walpole). Virgil himself does not escape blame, or theimputation of decadence.89

Nevertheless, Tacitus and Voltaire between them posed an awkward problemin the politics of culture under a commercial oligarchy. If the arts did not decline,did it follow that they could only flourish, in conditions restrictive of liberty andvirtue? Rousseau's answer we know; it lies at the end of nearly every avenueopened by this question. More immediately, the first step in seeking a way outof the dilemma must be to find means of asserting that commerce and culture,prosperity, politeness, and the progress of the arts, themselves constituted modesof liberty and virtue that remained valid even under a governo stretto. Even repub-lican theory might be enlisted in this enterprise; since the wars of the MaritimePowers with France, Englishmen had been acquainted with the idea, which Dutchwriters had expressed before them, that the first republics had been trading citiesasserting the freedom of the seas against Cretan thalassocracies and Persian em-pires.90 Rhodes and Corinth might be set up instead of Sparta and Rome, and ifthe end result had been Athenian empire or Venetian oligarchy, Athens andVenice presented their own images of liberty. In mid-century Britain, however,the leading role in the identification of liberty with commercial culture was takenby Scots engaged, as we have seen, in the search for modes of freedom and virtuethat could grow in the space left by a forsaken political autonomy. We encounterhere forms of Whiggism not exclusively shaped by confrontation with the Tory-republican mixture that constituted opposition ideology in England.

Walpole was pulled down by forces combining country discontents and urbanbellicosity, but the years succeeding his fall witnessed no revival of patriot virtue,merely the unencouraging rise of the Pelhams. The great age of literary satireseemed to have ended, and if there is a period of English history without signif-icant ideological dispute it may have been the late 1740s and early 1750s.91 InScotland, however, the decade was punctuated by a mainly Highland Jacobiterebellion and a renewed effort to impose economic modernization on the moun-

89 Howard K. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in Augustan England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Prince-ton, N.J. , 1978).

90Charles Davenant was an English expositor of this view; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp.437-8. For the Dutch, see E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch RepublicanThought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen, 1980). It is tenable — to say no more — that the Britishnations were idiosyncratic in owning a rhetoric both republican and agrarian. See Pocock, "TheProblem of Political Thought in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotism and Politeness," with com-ment by E. O. G. Haitsma Mulier and E. H. Kossman, Theoretische Geschiedenis IX, 1 (1982), pp.3-36.

91 See, however, Maurice Goldsmith, "Faction Detected: Ideological Consequences of Robert Wal-pole's Decline and Fall," History LXIV, 1 (1979), pp. 1-19.


tains: an episode that served to intensify awareness of the historically contingentcharacter of the Scottish union with England and of commercial society in gen-eral. Southward-facing Scots, like David Hume and Tobias Smollett, were wellable to see the connection with the debates that had gone on in England since1698, and the striking growth in Scottish literature occurring between the Ja-cobite rising in 1745 and the American Revolution in 1776 includes a reevalua-tion of English history and the formation of a distinctively Scottish way of view-ing the history of society in general.

In the essays he began to write following the failure of his first philosophicaltreatise, Hume revised his earlier censures of Walpole and began to argue that apolite liberty — the freedom of a man to enjoy his property and his intellect —might flourish under commercial conditions, not merely in a Whig parliamentaryoligarchy but even in a Bourbon absolute monarchy.92 Liberty in this sense wasintimately connected with the authority whose protection it required, but, forreasons that may be extended into the philosophical, Hume did not suppose therelation to be a simple one. In his essays on the English, which was now theBritish, constitution he stressed its ultimate instability. The balance of indepen-dent powers, of which it had been supposed to consist since the Answer to theNineteen Propositions, might end in a republic or even an anarchy, and the parlia-mentary "influence of the crown," by which the edifice was supposedly heldtogether, might end in an absolute monarchy or even in a despotism.93 It issignificant that Hume, in general so unmistakably a defender of the Whig com-mercial aristocracy, expressed unmistakably Tory fears of the power of publiccredit, which by rendering both real and mobile property valueless might destroythe natural aristocracy of land-inheriting families.94 In his writings on the socialcharacter of religion, he showed superstition and enthusiasm, mythopoeicpolytheism and philosophic monotheism, as both supporting and subverting thesevered principles of authority and liberty.95 The long polemic against enthusi-asm was not at an end, and Hume represents the conservative character of en-lightenment in Protestant countries; he reminds us at the same time that theinner dynamics of Protestantism were not yet worked out.

Hume held that commerce and enlightenment were producing a society pref-erable to anything in antiquity; he also held that the Whig regime in Britain wasunstable for reasons partly historical and partly rooted in the constitution ofsociety itself. His modernism therefore possessed a double face. He believed thatthe reigning order was progressive but at the same time that it was fragile. His92 Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics; and J a m e s Moore , " H u m e ' s Political Science and the Classical

Republ ican T r a d i t i o n , " Canadian Journal of Political Science X , 4 (1977) , p p . 8 0 9 - 3 9 .93 H u m e , Essays, " W h e t h e r the Bri t ish Gove rnmen t inclines more to Absolute Monarchy or to a

Republ ic . "94 H u m e , "Of Public Credi t . "95 H u m e , "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," "The Natural History of Religion."


History of England, which began to appear in 1754, is the greatest of a series ofwritings that express impatience with any complacent synthesis that imputes tothe Whig order a comprehensiveness it does not possess. He included Locke withRapin, Hoadly and Sidney, among those authors whose compositions he de-scribed as "most despicable,"96 though some strange simplifications here havesuggested that it was a Scottish rather than an English Lockeanism he had inmind. But he held in equal contempt the writings of Whig historians such asRapin de Thoyras,97 and there is a sense in which the History of England carrieson the contention of Walpole's defenders that liberty in England is little olderthan 1688.

Hume goes back to Harrington and even more to Brady in arguing that thegovernment of England was feudal under the Normans, Angevins, and Plantag-enets;98 the doctrine of an ancient constitution is therefore untenable — or rather,he says in a footnote he must have enjoyed writing, at least three ancient consti-tutions can be made out in the English past.99 Subsequently, what he calls "arevolution in manners," and describes, as do Fletcher and Defoe, in terms of thegrowth of enlightenment and trade,100 brought about the Protestant Reforma-tion, a period of almost Turkish despotism under the later Tudors, an interludeof confusion about the true distribution of authority and power, a decade ofenthusiasm and hypocrisy in the 1650s, and finally the establishment of a rela-tively ordered liberty in 1688. Beyond that point Hume declined to go; thehistory of England since the Revolution was left to Tobias Smollett, whose Toryand radical ideas acquired in London led him to a greater neo-Harringtonianstress on corruption and the monied interest than Hume would have thoughtright to endorse.

Such is what we have learned from Duncan Forbes to call Hume's "scepticalWhiggism" (the phrase is ultimately Hume's own) and oppose to the "vulgarWhiggism" that confused Bourbon absolutism with despotism and upheld beliefin an ancient constitution. But there are two kinds of "vulgar Whiggism." Thereis the ancient constitutionalism of the neo-Harringtonians — Old Whig with theCommonwealthmen and their republican canon, Queen Anne Tory with Boling-broke and the Craftsman — who located in the past those principles from whichministers, standing armies, and the monied interest had brought the constitutionto degeneration. The modernism of Walpole's defenders had been designed againstthis thesis, and Hume without doubt shared many of their intentions. On the

9 6 H u m e , History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (new ed i t ion in

6 vols.; London, 1762), vol. VI, p. 443. A footnote identifying Locke and other authors aimed atwas deleted from this edition.

9 7 J . Y . T . G r e i g , e d . , The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1932) , vol . I, p . 2 5 8 .9 8 V ic to r C . W e x l e r , David Hume and the History of England (Ph i lade lph ia , 1980) .

" H u m e , History of England, vol . IV , p . 3 l 4 n .100History of England, vol . IV , p . 3 3 6 ; also I I I , p p . 6 3 - 7 , 1 2 1 - 2 ; V , p . 6 8 .


other hand, and far more central to the concerns of regime Whiggism, there isthe ancient constitutionalism of the "Whig interpretation of history," which de-fended the parliamentary leaders of 1604—42 by endorsing their case for theantiquity of law and Parliament. Hume's bad reputation in English historiogra-phy for the next hundred years, until and including the time of Macaulay, arosefrom his attack on this way of interpreting the seventeenth century. Following alead originally given by Harrington, he saw the reign of Charles I as a period inwhich historical change had rendered the dualisms of medieval government —Harrington's "wrestling ground between king and nobility," Hume's "absolutemonarchy under which the people had many privileges"101 — finally and deci-sively unworkable, so that its problems could no longer be solved by the tradi-tional remedies. The more Hume reflected on this situation, the more he becamepersuaded that the king enjoyed just as good a case as the parliamentary leader-ship — given that neither had a very good case in that age of confusion — and hisoffense in Whig eyes was that he argued for king against Parliament and slightedthe ancient constitution in so doing. Times had changed since the Craftsmancontroversy and the fall of Walpole. In the 1730s and even the 1740s oligarchyand ministerial rule could be defended by asserting the modernity of parliamen-tary freedom against the Tory and republican appeal to the ancient constitution.In the 1760s, when the reaction to Hume's History was at its height, somethinghad happened to make defenders of a system no older than 1714 fall back on theappeal to antiquity and the "Whig interpretation of history." We shall have toconsider what that was, as well as the curious transformation of terminology thatwas to lead to Hume's being branded a Tory. Meanwhile, we have to observethat the argument of modernity was far from being exhausted or given up.

From "sceptical" we turn with Forbes to "scientific Whiggism." During thetwo following decades Hume's friends and associates in Edinburgh and Glasgow,William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar — the pre-sent writer would add Edward Gibbon, as a star revolving in an intersecting orbit— produced the extraordinary series of works that together constitute their au-thors as "the Scottish historical school." These present a theory of history thatranges across the disciplines from moral philosophy to political economy, andarise from concerns transcending the ideological conflict between the regime Whigsand their critics; yet, as Forbes's nomenclature reminds us, they never cease to beilluminated by that conflict. Paying little regard to the ancient constitution, withwhich as Scotsmen they felt no great concern, they situated the transition frombarbaric and feudal to commercial and polite society in the context of the four-stage scheme of history, in which a progressive division and specialization of laborhad refined the passions, polished the manners, and multiplied the interactions

101 Harrington, Political Works, p. 196; Hume, History of England, vol. V, pp. 110n.-112.


of human beings of both sexes, and in so doing had rendered them capable of theproduction and distribution of wealth. From the perspective adopted in this es-say, their argument may be seen as an immense elaboration of the insight firstreached in 1698: that the individual might (with Defoe) or might not (withFletcher) be justified in abandoning the search for liberty in self-sufficiency infavor of one for liberty in increasing sociability and exchange; the weight ofScottish argument is, of course, almost wholly on the side taken by Defoe. Yetthe claims of the individual self and its military and civic autonomy continuedto be heard; there were controversies over the militia and the authenticity ofOssian; and perhaps the most alienated Scottish voice of the mid-century comesfrom London, where Smollett's radical Tory concern with corruption led him toequate civilization with corruption but freedom with savagery. Dumbarton heproposed as the point where Britons fleeing from Roman despotism had wiselybut precariously stopped short of Gaelic barbarism.102 In Edinburgh and Glas-gow they proposed to keep moving along the lines of civilization, yet were neverunaware of the dangers of doing so. Ferguson, Smith, and Millar all knew therecould be such a thing as overspecialization. The mobilization of commerce andpoliteness in support of Whiggism and the union had nevertheless reached a stateof imaginative completeness.

III. From the Seven Years' War to the Constitution ofthe United States

We now return to the politics of Westminster, London, and England as theytook shape in and from the late 1750s. The ensuing period, however one datesit, was one of dislocation and fragmentation, which has been subjected to a frag-menting historical analysis; to say anything suggestive of a pattern of develop-ment is dangerous. Nevertheless, it is possible to construct a scenario in whichthe polemic against the oligarchic regime remained in many ways the same, whiledisplaying some major regroupings of opinion and beginning to undergo somedeep-seated change. The elder Pitt's wartime ministry involved association be-tween, on the one hand, the Pelham and Grenville-Temple connections amongthe great Whig families and, on the other, a faction of London aldermen, withsupport among the liverymen and in the streets among the "mobile," headed byWilliam Beckford and others identifiable as urban Tories. In his role as opposi-tion orator, Pitt had employed the usual patriot rhetoric aimed at independent

102 The notion of Dumbarton as marking the frontier between Belgic or Cymric agriculture andPictish or Gaelic pasturage may also be found in Thomas Carte, A General History of England, 3vols. (London, 1747), vol. I, pp. 130, 175.


country gentlemen, supposed to waver in matters of foreign policy between blue-water strategies and outright avoidance of conflict, in either case inspired bydistaste for continental wars that intensified the national debt and the Hanoverianconnection. Since Pitt's London supporters had West and East Indian associa-tions, they could be ardent supporters of war outside Europe, in America andIndia as well as at sea; the word "patriot" thus took on its mid-century (or post-Jacobite) meaning, combining the notion of a noisy blue-water bellicosity withthe image of a quasi-republican supporter of his country against his king, or atleast his king's ministers. It is not to assert that a republican revolution was everlikely in England to say that "patriots" often employed revolutionary and evenrepublican language. The Beckfords began their public career as urban Tories,but it is in their journal the Monitor that hints have been found, as early as thefifties, of the notion of appealing to the nation, the people, and even a nationalconvention against a corrupt and minister-dominated parliament.103 By the timehe died as Lord Mayor in 1771, William Beckford was using Commonwealthlanguage and threatening the king with a radical evocation of 1688, if not 1641or 1649, while the language of the Sawbridges was as startling in its way as theactions of the Wilkites. Tory and republican appear in this projection as remain-ing brothers under the skin; nevertheless, it is from the time of Pitt the Elderthat the word "Tory" begins losing the meanings it had borne since the time ofBolingbroke and taking on new significances.

Perceptions, no doubt exaggerated or distorted, of the intervention in politicsof the new king George III and his adviser Lord Bute had much to do withinitiating these changes. It has many times been shown that the king was actingwithin the normal conventions of politics and had no thought of acting other-wise, but the fact remains that he was denounced, and that language was avail-able to denounce him, for acting outside Whig rules.104 That Bute was a Stuartmade it possible to impute to him designs of restoring Stuart ideals of kingship,while the circumstance that George III was apparently using the authority andinfluence of the crown to break up constraints that Whigs imposed on him madeit possible to see him, and believe that he saw himself, as a "patriot king" in thesense in which Bolingbroke had adumbrated that deeply paradoxical term. Herewe have a first move toward the reunion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century connotations of "Tory." Once the "independence of the crown," a Bo-lingbrokean term, could be linked with the "prerogatives of the crown" fought forby the pre-1688 Stuarts, Charles II Tories and George II Tories could be seen as103Marie C. Peters, "The Monitor on the English Constitution, 1755-65; New Light on the Ideolog-

ical origins of English Radicalism," English Historical Review LXXXVI, 341 (1971), pp. 706-27 .See also Nicholas Rogers, "Resistance to Oligarchy: The City Opposition to Walpole and hisSuccessors, 1724—47," in London in the Age of Reform, ed. John Stevenson (Oxford: 1977).

104For the first half of this sentence see Richard Pares, George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953);for the second, Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957).


one and the same, and aristocratic politicians resentful of George Ill's policiescould make believe they were fighting for the good old cause for which Hampdenhad died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold.105 A new chapter, with newheroes and villains, could now be written in the Whig interpretation of history,but Walpolean modernism would have to be abandoned and Humean skepticismdenounced. Scientific Whigs were liable to find themselves, without much re-pugnance, supporters of George Ill's ministries. It is testimony both to the in-tellectual power of Hume's History, and to the changing ideological climate inwhich it appeared, that almost a century later it still seemed to Macaulay hisprincipal adversary and competitor.

There were deeper ambivalences still. The regime that had prevailed since theSeptennial Act was above all a regime of influence and patronage. The extent towhich patronage was concentrated in a few hands, and the efficacy of patronagewhoever exercised it, may easily be exaggerated;106 yet the regime was widelyperceived as one in which "the influence of the crown" was exercised concurrentlywith the not dissimilar "influence" exercised by Whig magnates, with the resultthat those currently occupying the king's councils could be denounced as selfish"ministers," and those currently out of place denounced as a selfish "faction,"each seeking to add the crown's influence to their own. This was the small changeof political rhetoric, even when it was not far from the truth; but when GeorgeIII displaced powerful groups of Whig politicians, they not only denounced himor his advisers for using his influence against them but contrived, sometimes byaffecting to regard him as a patriot king in the making, to accuse him of design-ing a real change in the structure of politics. They said that the influence of thecrown was being used to destroy the independent capacity of the aristocracy toform associations — by the use of patronage, party association, popularity, or anycombination of them — that could then recommend themselves to the royal coun-cils. For many years this complaint was regularly urged in Whig rhetoric andliterature. Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770) is a famous example,and leading Whigs now formed and long retained the belief that the use beingmade of royal influence was "Tory."107 They had something Bolingbrokean inmind. The influence of the crown, which Bolingbroke had imagined capable ofrestoring the independence of Parliament, was in their vision being employed to

103 This finds a late echo in Macaulay's description of the Rockingham Whigs as "worthy to havecharged at the side of Hampden at Chalgrove, or to have exchanged the last embrace with Russellon the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields." Macaulay, "The Earl of Chatham," Critical and HistoricalEssays, 3 vols. (Boston, 1901), vol. Ill, p. 654.

106J. B. Owen, "Political Patronage in Eighteenth-Century England," in The Triumph of Culture, ed.P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto, 1972); Clark, Dynamics of Change, p. 15.

107 F. O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London and New York, 1967) has someuseful quotations from Portland, Fitzwilliam, and Lady Rockingham in the years 1793—4 (pp.198-9, 211).


break up the independent associations of the aristocracy and their followings andsubject Parliament to royal control. Burke shared this belief in an aristocracynatural because independent, and if there is anything new about the theory ofparty expressed in Thoughts on the Present Discontents, it is Burke's belief that aris-tocratic associations are more than combinations of patrons and clients.108 Nat-ural aristocracy may prefer governo largo to governo stretto; to this extent the Septen-nial oligarchy was showing signs of loosening up.

The Whig aristocracy, against whose oligarchy all patriot rhetoric had beendirected, were now in a position to put themselves forward — or a faction amongthem identifying themselves with the whole could put them forward - as thetrue patriots or natural leaders of a free society, while stigmatizing the patronageof the state as a design to restore the excessive powers of the seventeenth-centurycrown. This enabled them to identify new (if fictitious) "Tories" with old, andto go (sometimes consciously) in search of the rhetoric of the First Whigs, withwhich Shaftesbury in 1675 had tried to turn the House of Lords against theministerial corruption he attributed to Danby. The language of Whig oppositionturned back toward the ancient constitution and republican virtue — those linkedif disparate vocabularies — and there could appear noblemen expressing radical,republican, and even democratic ideals, the counterparts in fact of Milord Stan-hope in Mably109 and Milord Bomston in Rousseau. Some of these called forreforms in the system of representation, and even for manhood suffrage; as weshall see, there were followings to be gained by doing so. But no Whig aristocratout of office would find it easy to break with the methods of rule by patronageand high politics exercised since the Septennial Act, or with the system of publiccredit that was twenty years older. They might deplore, and even propose toreform, the probably mythical enlargement of royal patronage under George IIIor the much more real enlargement of the national debt by the Seven Years' War,but they must go on administering these systems whenever they might comeback into office. We may say, then, that the game of politics had not changedvery much, but we must also say that the rhetoric employed in the game envis-aged increasingly significant alterations in its rules.

(.it)

Like the language employed in parliamentary opposition, from which it cannotaltogether be separated, the language of radical criticism of the regime began to

108See John Brewer, "Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument," The Historical JournalXVIII, 1(1975), pp. 188-201.

109"Stanhope" appears in Mably's Des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen, dated 1758 but published 1789.See Keith Michael Baker, "A Script for a French Revolution: The Political Consciousness of theAbbe Mably," Eighteenth-Century Studies XIV, 3 (1981), pp. 235-63 .

The varieties ofWhiggism from Exclusion to Reform 257

change after 1760. The term "Tory," perhaps because it could now be applied tothe policies of the crown, ceases being applied to the recurrent turbulence ofLondon aldermen and their following, about the time when their perception ofPitt as a lost leader who had gone over to the oligarchy was producing a morevehement hostility to Whig aristocracy and even to aristocracy as such. Theirrhetoric remained "patriot" in many ways, and it by no means shed all its Torycharacteristics. The rabid anti-Scotticism of the North Briton had more to do withhatred of Hanoverians, especially when Scots and Hanoverians were both sol-diers, than with hatred of Jacobites. But patriot radicalism was no less urbanthan Toryism had been before it, and as we pursue the explorations of popularpolitics conducted by John Brewer and others,110 from the streets and clubs ofLondon to those of provincial towns, we seem to be following the growth of a"public opinion," increasingly given to new forms of "association," which it ishard not to consider as the self-assertive voice of those borough populations whosepolitical weight had been reduced since the not very distant time when the oli-garchy had been established. Not only urban Toryism, but the "True," "Old,""Independent" Whiggisms of the Commonwealth tradition have by now beenidentified as semi-interchangeable modes of protest, dating from the late seven-teenth century, against the increasing consolidation of an oligarchic Whig re-gime. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Exclusionist, country, and Com-monwealth program of "more frequent," annual, or triennial parliaments beganagain (if it had ever ceased) to be the theme of polemic against the regime, andremained a staple of radical demand until the days of the Chartists; or that theinterregnum heroes of the canon put together by John Toland began yet again tobe cited by such radical sages as Thomas Hollis, James Burgh, Catherine Saw-bridge Macaulay, and at a later period, the young William Wordsworth, someof whom even display an awareness that there had once been such people asAgitators and Levellers.111 The independent and often Dissenting borough pop-ulations were, it might seem, once again finding their Old Whig and Common-wealth voices. We are tempted to conclude that the Tory interlude in their his-tory was over, but to make such an assertion brings us once more face to facewith the problem of telling Tory and Commonwealth apart.

110John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976);"English Radicalism in the Age of George III," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776,ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980). For further bibliography, see Albert Goodwin, TheFriends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge,Mass., 1979), p. 533-4, and Zaller, "Continuity of British Radicalism," cited n. 82. For everydiscovery that a crowd was "manipulated," there is a corresponding need to know what was in itsmembers' minds that made them willing to be "manipulated"; it may and may not have beenwhat the manipulators sought to put there.

1l1A study of the extent in this century of historical knowledge concerning the interregnum radicalswould be worth having; ours is largely dependent on the Thomason and other collections, whichbecame available only with the opening of the British Museum.


The radical voice of the 1770s further complicates matters by uttering propo-sitions not usually to be found in the rhetoric of early Georgian opposition. It isat times militantly hostile to aristocratic control of politics and does not differ-entiate very much between Whig aristocrats in opposition to George III andWhig aristocrats in office under him. That monarch's actions preclude any lastingattempt to appeal to him as a "patriot king" and he is seen less as a counterweightto the aristocracy than as their partner in operating a repressive and corruptparliamentary regime. The attack is directed against the aristocracy, not so mucha class of landholding seigneurs as one of borough owners, borough patrons, andboroughmongers; there are complaints, however, that men of landed wealth shoulduse the borough system to dominate the parliamentary representation of the menof movable wealth - or, when the appeal is being made to artisans, the menwhose wealth is in their labor — inhabiting the towns. In conjunction, perhaps,with this tendency to regard the borough as a repressive device, there is rejectionof any "idea" of a patriot king or patriot minister and an insistence that the onlytrue patriots are the "people" themselves. A radical Lockeanism makes its ap-pearance, and the authority of the Second Treatise is often, though not necessarily,cited in support of the view that since the "people" are originators of their owngovernment, they may resume the power to alter that government, not merely(as Locke had emphasized) when it becomes repressive, but when it becomescorrupt, when it fails to give effect to their natural freedom, or more simply stillwhenever they find good reasons for doing so. This ultra-Lockean radicalism,entailing a democratic doctrine of permanent reform if not revolution, is to befound, occasionally but not uncharacteristically, at the leading edge of the repub-licanism that now took shape; it helps shift republican doctrine (in what measureremains to be determined) away from the polity of independent powers and to-ward the sovereignty of popular will.

At this point the voice of liberal-Marxist historians is heard loud and jubilant.Their principal concern is to affirm the autonomy in history of a kind of practice(in this case its ideology) called "bourgeois," and to present history whiggishly(in the Butterfieldian sense) as the unidirectional movement toward, and laterpast and away from, the ascendancy of this practice. To do so has become sodominant an enterprise that Marxist historians may be recognized by their inces-sant use of the term "bourgeois," non-Marxist (or "bourgeois") historians by theircare to avoid it. The function of the word in question is to denote the presenceand action of those whose wealth is movable and employed in controlling thelabor of others; we may agree that it is very important indeed to have means ofdenoting their presence and describing their action, without agreeing that theword "bourgeois" necessarily denotes and describes them satisfactorily. The wordhas, however, acquired a mystical value and become a test of orthodoxy. In thepresent case, the assumptions used by the liberal-Marxist historians are that an


opposition to something called "aristocracy," an emphasis on the individual'spossession of rights and property that government exists to protect, and the adop-tion of a Lockean brand of populism justify them — when these phenomena occurin conjunction — in using the magic word "bourgeois." The latent assumptionsare (1) that all the foregoing phenomena entail an acceptance of movable ratherthan real property as the basis of social and political reality, and (2) that thehistorical complex so constituted is and should be described as bourgeois, ongrounds that seem to be more than merely conventional. How the word enteredthe Marxist lexicon and came to be used as it now is offers a problem of whichlittle seems to be known and which will not be discussed here, though the presentwriter's sense that it has become a mystical term is strong enough to make himwish to avoid it. How far the English radicalism that took shape in the 1770sought to be described as bourgeois in the conventional sense, and how this inter-pretation ought to be operated if at all, are problems that do need to be examinedif a history of the "Whig" cluster of ideologies is to be adequately constructed.

The latest to write on these matters in the liberal-Marxist perspective is, pre-dictably, Isaac Kramnick. In "Republican Revisionism Revisited" he sets out toaver that the radicalism of the 1770s was "bourgeois" in the previously men-tioned senses, and therefore sharply distinct from the country, Tory, and OldWhig criticism of the Whig regime that had preceded it.112 He pursues this aim(as we have seen) by the adoption of two strategies. One is the dismissal of allbrands of neo-Harringtonian criticism as Tory, agrarian, ancient constitutional-ist, "nostalgic," and reactionary; the other is the repetition, more incantatoryand liturgical than anything else, with which he introduces the terms "bour-geois" and "middle class" into every sentence in which he characterizes the radi-cals of George Ill's reign. Concerning the first strategy, enough has surely beensaid to establish that it simply will not do. Early Georgian opposition was bothTory and Old Whig; Toryism itself was both rural and urban; Kramnick's at-tempt to reduce republican rhetoric to fox-hunting nostalgia is doomed from thestart. What remains not fully explained is how an ideology stressing Romanwarrior - civic values and the independence that came best from real propertypossessed the appeal it visibly had for town dwellers; but if we have not fullyexplained the fact, Kramnick does not help by denying its existence. The presentwriter has preferred the argument that since the target of criticism was the ma-nipulation of credit and the forms of dependence and corruption it could bring,the tradesman operating on his own stock could seem to share in the indepen-dence of the yeoman landholder; John Brewer in a significant article has shownthe ways in which such a tradesman might feel his independence threatened bythe private or public behavior of the aristocratic managers of debt.113 It did not

li2See sources cited in n. 73, this chapter. 113 "English Radicalism in the Age of George III."


follow that the tradesman must necessarily characterize himself as creditor in the"public" sense, or abandon a view of the world in which debtors and creditorsappeared almost equally dangerous. So long as professional men, tradesmen, andartisans believed themselves to be inhabitants of a domestic economy, a universeof masters and servants in which independence was to be pursued and dependenceavoided, a plebeian version of the Roman republican ideal would make somesense to them and the argument that it was predicated on an obsolete agrarianeconomy would benefit only their rulers. This does not mean that a democraticradicalism furnishing the individual with the politics of life in a world of ex-change relationships would not ultimately appear. Possibly it did appear in middle-Georgian London, and certainly we should be on the alert for its appearance; butwe will not be well equipped to detect it if we fetishize the term "bourgeois" andconstruct a naive and crude antithesis between republican and Lockean forms ofradicalism.

This mistake was not often made by critics and theorists in the later eighteenthcentury. James Burgh, a writer of the 1770s studied by Robbins, Kramnick, andothers,114 was indeed one of the early English authors known to have used theterm "bourgeoisie,"115 but he used it of the lesser citizenry of Holland, and whyhe used a French word in denoting Dutch social categories is as puzzling as whyBurke used the Dutch word "burghers" to denote the inhabitants of French towns- or who first used the word with reference to England. It was Burgh who com-plained that borough patronage subjected townsmen to great landed proprietors,but in order to increase the representation of great cities, he envisaged, like manyafter him, a reduction of borough and an increase of county representation.116

There began at this time a lively historical debate (which has still to be studied)regarding the role of boroughs in English history.117 Were they originally inde-pendent communes or instruments of royal and aristocratic patronage? If we areto see in electoral reforms such as Burgh proposed the emergence of the "bour-geoisie" as a nationally acting "class," we must observe that they were destroyingthe boroughs to do so. Dialectical rhetoric will doubtless inform us that they114 Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, pp. 364-8; Carla Hay, James Burgh: Spokesman for

Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington, D.C., 1979); Martha K. Zebrowski," One Cato IsNot Enough; or, How James Burgh Found Nature's Duty and Real Authority, and Secured theDignity of Human Nature against All Manner of Public Abuse, Iniquitous Practice, Vice andIrreligion," doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1984. Burgh quoted as freely from theTories Brady, Carte, and Bolingbroke as from interregnum sources, Locke, and the Common-weal thmen.

115James Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3 vols., (London, 1771), vol. I, p. 71.ll6Burgh, Political Disquisitions, vol. I, pp. 51-4, 75-7. See generally John Cannon, Parliamentary

Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge, 1972).117T. H. B. Oldfield's History of the Boroughs (published between 1792 and 1816 and then entitled

The Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland), in time the encyclopedia of the reformingmovement. It is noteworthy how Tucker relied upon Robert Brady's Boroughs (1690) and ThomasMadox's Firma Burgi (1726).


were emancipating themselves from the corporations in which their class hadtaken shape, but this rather easy move does not inform us how far mid-Georgianradicals claimed to be speaking for a historical class of "burgesses," a word thatshould have been developed in the formation of any English "bourgeois" con-sciousness. The operative historical myth remained ancient constitutionalist andneo-Harringtonian; it spoke of Anglo-Saxon tythingmen and hundredmen as rus-tic warriors governing themselves in village assemblies, among whom the free-men of ancient boroughs took their place almost as a detail. Burgh's generationindeed hesitated between this and a counterimage of the slow emergence of urbanfreedoms from feudal darkness; but the latter thesis did not explain why boroughshad rights or how they had lost them, and so entailed what did not occur, theabandonment of historic right and historic constitutionalism as radical argu-ments. It was not really possible (though it was sometimes tried) to attack themanagers of public credit and the standing army as a feudal aristocracy, andrights were better ancient than modern if one aimed to overthrow the regime ofthe Modern Whigs (especially when they too claimed the authority of the ancientconstitution).

Ancient rights, furthermore, could be as well enjoyed by a Roman republic asby a Gothic yeomanry, and Burgh took the next step this could imply. Alongsidethe Lockean image of the "people" retaining the right to form or reform govern-ments, he set the unmistakably republican notion that their greatest need, asthey recovered the rights that had been taken from them, was to form themselvesinto rhetorical and hortatory associations for the renewal of their moral and polit-ical virtue.118 Where Burke feared that a camarilla of courtiers was plotting todeprive the aristocracy of their capacity to form associations — "where bad mencombine, the good must associate"119 - Burgh thought that borough and countrypopulations bypassed by the Septennial Act must associate in the realm of moralvirtue before advancing (as they would later do in the guise of public opinion) toa reform of the parliamentary representation. The logically separate notions ofright and virtue could up to a point be unified by making each the preconditionof the other; and if this could be done, Locke could be made into an Old Whigafter all. As an acquisitive and commercial Modern Whig, however, he mustcontinue to serve the Whig regime. The naivete of Kramnick's feudal-bourgeoisantithesis prevents his realizing that a democratic individualism which presup-posed the individual's commitment to a society based on acquisition and ex-change could come about only when democrats fully accepted that the commerceassociated with Whig rule had transformed the social world, and they would not

118See the second and third volumes of Political Disquisitions, and Eugene C. Black, The Association:British Extra-Parliamentary Political Organisation, 1763—93 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

119 Burke, "Thoughts on the Present Discontents"; see Paul Langford, ed., The Writings and Speechesof Edmund Burke, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1981), vol. II, p. 315.


do that as long as they continued to employ neo-Harringtonian and Old Whigdoctrine to indict the Whig aristocracy. Since the problems of mid-GeorgianEngland remained so largely the problems of an agrarian society, it is not to bewondered at that rhetoric of this kind remained active until well after the Na-poleonic wars. The emergence of a democratic ideology for mobile individuals,of whom some were proprietors of capital and others of labor, ought indeed to belooked for and can be found, but the imposition of the category "bourgeois," asif it were descriptive of the social tensions of English society, merely leads us tomisunderstand the context in which this ideology emerged. To use "bourgeois"as a technical term for such proprietors is not to characterize any estate, order, orclass in Georgian social or historical reality.

Josiah Tucker, whose arguments were studied in Chapter 9, assailed Locke'spolitical theory in conjunction with the Commonwealth or classical republicanposition as if the two were interchangeable. He did so on the grounds that bothwere economically and historically archaic, and for the same reasons; no theory ofpolitical society that held individual rights and moral personality to be fullyformed at the beginning, or even in the early stages, of the growth of productiveand commercial relationships between human beings could lead to anything buta stunted and impoverished image of individual social personality. The classicalcitizen could not be other than a master of slaves, and this was why Romanrepublicanism appealed to Virginia and Jamaica planters; Locke had designed hisindividual for the slaveholding and feudal tenures of the Fundamental Constitutionsof Carolina, and the only difference between his scheme and Filmer's was that thelatter had made the rights of one individual, the former those of any individual,anterior to the relations natural to men in society, which were formed in thehistorical processes of commercial growth. Like his contemporary David Hume,whom he thought not quite modern and optimistic enough,120 Tucker was anheir of the defenders of Walpole; he was a defiant modernist who held that soundpolitical theory had been impossible before that great minister had discoveredthe true principles of government through taxation, and in nothing was he moretruly a Whig than in his conviction that it was commercial society that taughtmen deference to a natural aristocracy and civilized the "landed interest" to thepoint where it could assume that role.

Kramnick characteristically supposes that Tucker attacked the "bourgeois"radicals because they taught disrespect to the "traditional" aristocracy,121 but thewhole point of Tucker's case for the Whig aristocracy and the landed interest,who in his mind are one, is that they are not traditional, feudal, or classical, butmodern and progressive, and that deference increases with diversification. As for

120See his Four Tracts together with Two Sermons on Political and Commercial Subjects (Gloucester, 1774),pp. 4 1 , 47—8, where he opposes his progressive to Hume's cyclical view of history.

121 "Republican Revisionism Revisited," p. 653.


the contractarian and republican intellectuals, from Locke and Sidney to Priceand Priestley, Tucker saw them as the reverse of what is meant by "bourgeois."They were the archaic and reactionary apologists of "desperate Catilinarian men,"declasse patricians who, from Shaftesbury to Shelburne, had employed an indi-vidualist rhetoric in leading mobs of underemployed Londoners not subject tothe civilizing disciplines of the labor market. The malcontent "patriots" of 1776- Whig oppositionists, London aldermen, American colonists - were inhabitantsof an anachronistic equivalent of ancient Rome, with its faeces Romuli on theThames and its latifundia in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, where streetcrowds followed aristocratic demagogues and slaves were in bondage to theirmasters because free wage labor had not yet developed to the point where menknew their station and its duties, their interests, and the necessity of submissionto recognized authority. Tucker saw such a political economy developing in thenew manufacturing towns as the medieval selfishness of corporate boroughs dis-appeared, and he had no objection to seeing them enfranchised. To do so wouldnot entail any false theory of pseudonatural (because precommercial) rights.

Tucker's function is to remind us that the aristocratic Whig order was de-fended as modern by men born before it was established, and as a commercialorder against men who could be characterized as archaic and reactionary. TheScottish science of political economy, essentially a celebration of the progressiverole played in history by the diversification of labor, was perfectly compatiblewith a theory of the natural aristocracy of a hereditary landed class,122 and Hume'shistoricist skepticism regarding natural rights was easily turned against the in-dividualist radicals who continued to find Whig rule repressive. Tucker saw theregime of the progressive aristocracy as threatened by a coalition of reactionary"patriots," among whom he included Whig patricians who were traitors to theirclass, London guild bosses untouched by the free market, American colonistswhose wealth rested on smuggling and slavery, and a faction of religious radicalswhose ideology turned out under his analysis as archaic as that of the rest. Thesewere the English Unitarians like Price and Priestley, who employed Lockeantheses to argue for a complete separation of civil rights from religious identityand the reduction of all worship to free speculation and inquiry, and with themthe New England enlightened Puritans whom Burke had identified as "the dis-sidence of dissent, agreeing in nothing except the principles of liberty." Tuckerdespised Burke for furthering the coalition of transatlantic radicals, but foundnothing wrong with his diagnosis. He himself held radical libertarianism to be aPuritan survival, a secularized form of the radical autonomy of the free spirit;there is a sense in which he was carrying on the Anglican polemic against enthu-siasm, the insistence that private inspiration must be subject to the disciplines of

122See Hume's "Of Public Credit," in Essays.


polite, commercial, and deferential society. Scottish social thought containednothing, except Hume's religious skepticism, which was unfriendly to the aimsof the latitudinarian and Moderate clergies in either kingdom. In Price and PriestleyTucker (like others) detected the enthusiasts who of old had claimed that allauthority must give way before the freedom of the spirit and were now insistingthat all governments were illegitimate except insofar as they furthered the free-dom of the mind and the rights of the individual. Ten years before Burke heardof the sermon to the Revolution Society, Tucker saw Price as prepared to chal-lenge the legitimacy of any government that did not satisfy his ideals of liberty.The formation of a political culture based on moral dissent is arguably as signif-icant in the long run as that of one based on the mobility of property; it mayoutlast it.

Tucker wrote during the efflorescence of Scottish scientific Whiggism and duringthe rapid and revolutionary development of radical patriot Whiggism in Amer-ica. The early phases of the latter's history are still curiously little known; weknow a good deal about the doctrinal content and social function of Americanpatriot culture as a fully fledged entity, but not much about the processes wherebyit reached the colonies and subsequently took root there. What we can say aboutit is that it was Old Whig and does not raise for us the problems of seeing howa republican ethos could enter a High Church or Jacobite Tory mind; if therewere no Tories in Scotland, there were none in America either, and it may havebeen there that the word "Tory" first took on its paradoxical later meaning of anauthoritarian defender of the Whig order. Attempts have been made to deriveAmerican republicanism from Scottish origins, stressing the concepts of sympa-thy and sentiment to be found there,123 but it is a difficulty that Scottish scien-tific Whiggism evolved in a commercial and unionist direction highly supportiveof the Whig order, and we should be obliged to set the Enlightenment of FrancisHutcheson in opposition to that of Hume, Robertson, or even Adam Ferguson,and perhaps look behind Hutcheson to the radically Whig Irish environment, ofMolyneux, Molesworth, and possibly Toland, in which his career began.

If we evaluate American political culture as an English transplant, it will seemto present the spectacle of a country Whiggism, desperately mistrustful of anykind of court but not immediately involved in confrontation or interaction withany such. Colonial gentries, clerisies, and artisanates adopted patriot rhetoricwith alacrity, but were not at grips with the concrete reality of the regime it hadbeen formed to oppose. The patriot gentry of Virginia praised civic virtue as the

123 Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978).


ethos of their class and spoke much of the horrors of corruption, but were not alanded interest fearing displacement by a monied, or still less a parliamentary,gentry of "independent country members" constantly faced by the ministerialauthority their English equivalents rather half-heartedly denounced. In still Pu-ritan Massachusetts, in religiously heterogeneous Pennsylvania, and even in Vir-ginia where reigned that perfect gentry solution to the problem of ecclesiasticalauthority — an episcopal church without a bishop — patriot clergies and laitiesexploited the equation of religious with civic freedom, of congregation with re-public,124 and moved toward those deist and Unitarian solutions that equatedfaith with freedom to believe as one chose. None of them, however, was subjectto the toleration of an established church that ranked among the governing insti-tutions of a realm. Radical groups of merchants and artisans took shape in Bostonand Philadelphia and corresponded with Londoners who spoke, as they them-selves did, a language going back to the First Whigs and the Commonwealth;but those cities were not parliamentary boroughs subject to the Septennial Actand obliged to reexplore the history of parliamentary representation and parlia-mentary corruption as boroughs felt it in their intimate structure. An Americanpolitical society was one that spoke the language of parliamentary oppositionwithout being a parliamentary realm; its political culture was the criticism of aregime it experienced only at a distance.

Bernard Bailyn at the end of the 1960s found himself under considerable attackfor having suggested that radical Whig ideology had operated to render theAmerican Revolution inevitable because, given certain critical conjunctions, itmade it impossible for Americans to regard British policy as anything but adesign to destroy virtue and liberty and establish a despotism. To some scholarsthis carried the unwelcome suggestion that the Revolution was no more than anearly instance of "the paranoid style in American politics";125 to others it seemedto neglect other contributory causes and competing ideologies; to still others itappeared to disregard the functioning role of ideology within the structure ofcolonial society - and often they thought they already knew what that was.However, the proposition that an ideology may operate by itself and work bothwith and against realities instead of merely reflecting them is reinforced if wetake up the suggestion made in the preceding paragraph: that Old Whig ideologyin eighteenth-century America was in the nature of a Hartzian fragment,126 di-vorced from a context it still presupposed and, if at all controlled by the context

124 A l a n G . H e i m e r t , Religion and the American Mind from the Great Awakening to the Revolution ( C a m -b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1966) ; N a t h a n O . H a t c h , The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and theMillennium in Revolutionary New England(New H a v e n , C o n n . , 1977) .

125 See, most recently, Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceitin the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. XXXIX, 3 (1982), pp. 4 0 1 -41.

126 Louis B . H a r t z , e d . , The Foundation of New Societies ( N e w Y o r k , 1964) .


to which it had been transplanted, controlled by it in unpredicted and paradoxi-cal ways. There are many serious problems with Hartz's model, and the debatein which Bailyn became involved is not being continued here. But if we take upthe suggestion that Americans were conducting their political culture with theaid of a rhetoric formed to criticize a Whig parliamentary order in which theywere involved only at a distance and in which they did not participate, it mayhelp us understand why the rhetoric of Old Whig parliamentary opposition be-came a means of republican revolution in America, at the same time as it wasbecoming a language of franchise reform in England and of parliamentary auton-omy in Ireland.

If we examine the roles of the various components of Whig doctrine in theRevolution, we shall be obliged to separate contractarian and resistance theoryfrom republican theory, according to the purposes for which each was used. Theargument that parliament was not entitled to levy taxes in the colonies was orig-inally constitutionalist, but expanded to the point where it was expressed interms of natural rights and the powers and obligations of the state to maintainthem. Locke took his place here with Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel, and theend of the process was reached in the Declaration of Independence, when it hadto be maintained that what had been colonies were now states, fully empoweredto protect the peoples inhabiting them and their property; for this end they hadbeen established and it made them states. However, it had until very recentlybeen accepted that this function was rightfully discharged by another state, thatof Great Britain, and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind impelledCongress to endorse a quasi-Lockean rhetoric that enumerated the wrongful actsby which the government of that state had lost its lawful authority over theAmerican people (usually numbered in the singular, though organized into thir-teen states). The result, however, was less the dissolution of all government overthat people127 than the exaltation of their existing governments into states; rather,it was contended — by arguments that made use of Locke's doctrine of a right toemigrate — that these governments already existed in history and by right of theirhistoric origins enjoyed a contractual autonomy.128 The chain of arguments tothis point was juristic; it deployed the concept of right rather than the republicanconcept of virtue.

By the time of the Declaration of Independence the colonial governments werebeing reorganized as those of states, a process in which many have discerned thecrucial step into revolution. These constitutions rejected the authority of thecrown, and in consequence it became a question whether they should acknowl-

127 Only in some western districts, and for local reasons, was it much maintained that a dissolutionof government had occurred and a state of nature obtained. See Wood, Creation of the AmericanRepublic, pp. 282-91.

128 Jefferson 's Rights of British America a n d A d a m s ' s Letters ofNovanglus advance vers ions of these theses .


edge the monarchical principle, and "if so in what form. Here we switch from theargument tending to independence into the argument tending to republicanism,but this is not the first point at which the effect of republican language anddoctrine is to be felt. Prior to the Declaration - while, that is, he was still thecommander of troops who had taken up arms in a civil war — George Washingtonwas in the habit of referring to the forces opposing him as "the ministerial army."In Old Whig and Commonwealth rhetoric of eighteenth-century opposition gen-erally, the sovereign's ministers were conventionally presented as menacing fig-ures; it was they who disturbed the balance of the constitution, employed theinfluence of the crown to reduce Parliament to dependence, promoted standingarmies, and sought to corrupt virtue and establish a general despotism. This isthe rhetoric that, in Bailyn's presentation, could expand until it filled men'sminds and could permit only a totally Manichaean interpretation of every event.In an age when it seemed that executive authority could maintain itself only bypatronage, and that all patronage entailed the reduction of independence to de-pendence — when even David Hume held liberty and authority to exist in anirresolvable conflict — it was hard not to see virtue as perpetually threatened by atotal subversion. In Britain, where the realms were anciently possessed of sover-eignty, it could be said that the dualisms were necessary. Sovereignty mightthreaten liberty and virtue, yet sovereignty had to be maintained; the relationsbetween the two were those of constant adjustment, not the warfare of light withdarkness. In the American colonies, new states were grasping at sovereignty but,since they had not previously possessed it, were doing so with the aid of anideology that stressed far more nakedly than in Britain the power of sovereigntyto subvert. The logical outcome could only be republican. King and Parliamentmust be represented as totally corrupt and aiming at total corruption; the newstates must establish sovereignty in the only form that aimed at the systematicinstitutionalization of virtue. For the reason that they must become states, theymust become republics. The rhetoric of right as the precondition of independencemerged with the rhetoric of liberty and virtue as the preconditions of one another.

From a time at least as distant as that of the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions,it had been possible to represent the King, Lords, and Commons of England as abalance of equal and independent powers; yet this concept is formally republican,and theoretical republicans such as Harrington had been moved to try to replaceKing, Lords, and Commons by agencies better suited to the roles it enjoined. Acentral problem, though by no means the only one, had been that of sovereignty.Three independent powers might seem better qualified to check than to reinforceone another's majesty, but, as Weston and Greenberg have shown us, the Answerto the Nineteen Propositions could be used to promote the doctrine of a conjointexercise of sovereignty, in which it was debated whether the Lords and Commonstook part in legislation as initiatory wills or merely through their functions of


counseling the crown and giving or witholding consent to its actions. The prob-lem was further complicated as language slid from describing King, Lords, andCommons as estates to vesting them with the executive, judicial, and legislativepowers; for once the king was characterized as an executive, it became apparentthat he also legislated and did so as King-in-Parliament, and any attempt toseparate executive and legislative and place them in equilibrium as independentagencies must encounter the shock of reality. A rhetoric directed against minis-ters, placemen, and courtiers could for a long time obscure this contradiction;they could be represented as the minions and intermediaries of power, unknownto the constitution and liable by misusing the influence of the crown to destroythe balance of the constitution by bringing powers that should be independentinto dependence on one another. From the circumstance that it was not knownhow the executive could subsist except by patronage, ministers (and public credit)acquired that supposed capacity for infinite malignity and subversion with whichthe age invested them. Once attention was paid, however, to the facts of legis-lation or fiscality, it became apparent that executive and legislative were notseparate and could not be; the king was present in Parliament in the mediatorypersons of his ministers, and acted there to pass laws and to execute policies.There was even a body of post-Harringtonian doctrine that contended that heneeded influence and patronage, as his ancestors had needed the ties of tenure andvassalage, to attach members of the legislature to his interest and so get thesethings done.129

Once again we see why regime Whiggism took up pre-Whig constitutionaldoctrine, and why it was that Old Whig, Tory, and country oppositions were toa certain extent in bad faith; their rhetoric implied such criticism of parliamen-tary monarchy that it could be imagined that a republic might replace it, yetnone of these oppositions had any program whatever for doing so. No bill for ageneral expulsion of placemen from Parliament ever got off the ground, and itbecomes increasingly hard to believe that any was seriously intended; yet suchbills went on being moved, and the rhetoric and doctrine that went with themcontinued being voiced. There was at least this to be said for Hume's belief thatthe balance of the constitution, though the best that could be hoped for, wasinherently unstable: there was a persistent disjunction between language andreality, and practice contained disjunctions that theory could not explain away.The regime of oligarchy incessantly criticized itself, just as the commercial ar-istocracy criticized itself in the name of agrarian and republican values. Much ofwhat we term ideology was in fact Utopia (though we must not confuse Utopiawith nostalgia).

But Americans were not skeptical Whigs in the Humean sense; the very con-

l29See Reed Browning's study of Samuel Squire, chap. V; n. 62, this chapter.


siderable skepticism of the Founding Fathers did not go beyond Franklin's fa-mous apophthegm, "a republic, madam, if you can keep it." They took the leftfork from the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions and having convinced themselves,for reasons that may have been partly Hartzian, of the thoroughgoing corruptionof ministerial parliamentarism, they took the separation of powers seriously, ex-cluded the executive secretaries from seats in Congress, and so rejected parlia-mentary monarchy forever and committed themselves to a republican experi-ment. Josiah Tucker, with his usual acumen, perceived both the American warand American independence as means to preserve the sovereignty of Parliamentagainst enemies who were as much Tory as republican; if the colonies could notbe subjected to a necessary sovereignty, then sovereignty itself must cast themout. The disruption of Whig empire was a disruption of the varying intimationsof Whig political culture; if America could never again be a parliamentary mon-archy, then Commonwealth radicalism in parliamentary Britain could never againbe the same. It had been a pusillanimous idea, thought Jefferson, that Americahad friends in Britain worth keeping in with. 13°

The republican component in the Whig inheritance did not, however, control,though it did modify, the formation of governments in the United States. Gor-don Wood131 has examined the process by which several states set up bicamerallegislatures in the apparent expectation of duplicating the ideal relationship offew to many that characterized the classical republican model, but discoveredthat even in Virginia a naturally leading elite and naturally deferential vulgarwere no longer to be found.132 Wood argues that republican theory presupposeda society of estates, but in some of its versions the aristocratic component needonly be one of talent, whereas in others the few were defined by their politicalfunction rather than by their inherent virtue. What can be clearly seen is thatpost-Revolutionary thinking early showed itself acutely suspicious of the idea ofnatural aristocracy and unwilling to distinguish it from hereditary or otherwiseentrenched aristocracy. John Adams, the most systematic thinker in the olderrepublican style, who wished to warn that a natural aristocracy of some kindwould always emerge, and that it must be anticipated and rendered harmless bybeing provided with a useful function, found himself accused of designs to restorea hereditary nobility.133 Natural republics, as they may be termed, self-differen-tiated into patricians and plebeians, gentlemen and yeomen, signally failed tomake their appearance in the constitution-making period; to many it seemed thata mobile and acquisitive bonanza was taking shape instead, and this was lamentedl30Julian P. Boyd, Lyman H. Butterfield, and Mina R. Bryan, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson

(Princeton, N.J., 1950-), vol. I, p. 314.UlCreation of the American Republic, p p . 3 9 1 - 4 2 5 .132 For the processes occurring there, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Wil-

liamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982).133 Wood, Creation of the American Republic, chap. XIV, pp. 565-92.


on all sides as a failure of virtue, the principle universally known to be cardinalto republics. Very cautiously, publicists began to examine what forms of govern-ment there might be that did not depend on virtue.134

What was taking shape would have to be a republic, in the sense that therewas no other acceptable alternative to parliamentary monarchy. That constitu-tion, from which the United States had just broken away, relied heavily on theconcept that the nation, or the people, were represented both by the king as apublic person and in his councils by persons elected to "represent" shires andboroughs. In Britain at this period, as the pendulum swung against the regimeof the Septennial Act, it was being argued among the radicals both that theremedy for corruption lay in a better representation of the people - meaning onein which more members of the communities represented took part in electingtheir representatives — and that the ultimate authority to form and reform gov-ernments resided in this same people as an entity. If these two arguments wereallowed to interact, there could emerge the idea of a people who constantly renewvirtuous government, and their own virtue, by regularly choosing their represen-tatives to constitute a government. Though Rousseau, far away in Europe, hadalready damned this concept for separating virtue from personality, it retainedmuch of the republican's characteristic concern for virtue. The form of govern-ment that emerged from representation, however, was a sovereign to whom thepeople in the act of election transferred rights and powers they might otherwisehave exercised for themselves, and there can be nothing further from the repub-lican principle than the idea that a select body of persons can represent, imper-sonate, or stand for a body of autonomous citizens and claim that when it governsthem, they are governing themselves. To the classical republican or the moderncommunitarian,135 representation is little better than alienation, and there arestill those who claim that in constructing a representative democracy, the Amer-ican founders were saddling the people with a Hobbesian Leviathan.136 The prep-ositions contained in the great phrase "government of the people, by the people,and for the people" can be made to form a trinity of consubstantial ambiguities.

As the Whig tradition separated into its dual constituents, the theory andpractice of representative democracy were developed in the United States far fasterthan in Britain; but because they were developed in the context of a republicanexperimental structure, they encountered problems that did not confront theBritish a century later, when they set about the democratization of parliamentarymonarchy. It was as a second best to the republican ideal that the people were

134 J . R . P o l e , Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic ( N e w Y o r k ,1966), pp. 531-2.

135 B e n j a m i n R . B a r b e r , The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton(Princeton, N.J., 1974).

136 F r a n k M . C o l e m a n , Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations ( T o r o n t o , 1 9 7 8 ) .


proclaimed capable of representation in all branches of government; James Mad-ison paid more than lip service to this truth when he calmly reversed acceptedterminology and proclaimed that a polity in which the people governed them-selves was a democracy, and one in which they were governed by their ownrepresentatives a republic.137 There was a sense in which Madison was maintain-ing the republican paradigm by giving the representatives the role of a few andthe electors that of a many; the former constituted a natural aristocracy (qualifiedby the fact of election) who made the decisions, the latter a natural democracywho evaluated the decisions after they had been made and the qualifications ofthose who had made them. Even the idea that representatives should be in-structed by their constituents need not annul this relationship. But the few andthe many are in a relationship of deliberation rather than of power, which doesnot define the capacity of representation to produce sovereignty. Madison hadfurther to maintain that the people retained sovereignty in the act of choosingrepresentatives to exercise it, and this had to be done in two ways: first, byelaborating devices to make the elected accountable to their electors — the ideaof frequent elections was deeply embedded in the Commonwealth tradition; andsecond, by a separation of powers that ensured that the representatives could notcorruptly consolidate themselves to monopolize the government. We have seenhow separation of powers emerged together with conjoint sovereignty to giveparliamentary monarchy its republican shadow; in this way too the oppositionsof eighteenth-century Britain left their legacy to the American republic.

None of the states constituting that republic, however, presented by the endof the century the image of a classical or Harringtonian republic of interactinggentry and freemen, and if they had it was a recognized impossibility to drawseveral such republics together in any union more perfect than that of an Achaeanleague. The fact that government in each state was better constituted along rep-resentative than classical republican lines made it more possible to extend theprinciple of representative sovereignty to the point where it could define therelations of states to union; we reach the point where Whiggism is transformedinto Federalism, and what was originally English becomes that which can onlybe American. The separation of powers, however — that oddly ambiguous legacy— left unsolved the relation of executive to legislature; to this day a parliamentaryobserver sees the United States government as consisting of an executive whopersistently tries to legislate and a legislature that as persistently frustrates him,and the observer wonders how far this accounts for the growth of court and palacepolitics in the city where (as it happens) these words are being written.138 An

157The Federalist, no. 10, The Federalist Papers, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown; Conn., 1961), pp.6 0 - 1 .

138 As a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in the Smithsonian Institutein Washington.


attempt to solve the problem along regime Whig lines was made under the firstpresidency by Alexander Hamilton, who sought to establish in Congress some-thing in the nature of a "presidential interest" made up of men who would findit in their interest to support measures proposed by the administration.139 ThatHamilton's project included use of executive patronage, a strong, federally con-trolled professional army, a funded national debt, and a Bank of the United Statesensured a passionate polemic in which he was accused of a design to install allthe techniques of government by corruption supposedly perfected by Walpole. 14°Americans once more showed how deeply they could fear a type of regime ofwhich they had little direct experience.

It is interesting that the accusation of contriving to establish an office-holdingand fund-holding aristocracy merged instantly with that of seeking to restore ahereditary titled nobility and king. Americans brought up to dread and detestthe Whig oligarchy saw it as both ancient and modern, both feudal and fiscal,and feared both its despotism in the past and its corruption in the future. Therecould be no better illustration of how the republican mind located itself, and themodes of property on which it thought it rested, in a scheme of history stillcyclical and degenerative; American optimism, of which there was plenty, con-sisted in the hope of escape from history into Utopia, wilderness, or millennium.This is the moment at which to take up the problem of how far the politicaleconomy of republicanism persisted in America; how far, that is, the republicwas held to presuppose an agrarian, unspecialized economy and to fear the cor-ruptions of industry and commerce. We may pass over much of what has beenurged to the effect that the Jeffersonian farmer was less a self-sufficient yeomanthan a commercial producer for a market,141 since it has never been alleged thatrepublican virtue was incompatible with trade and industry. Jefferson could notbe more anxious for economic modernization than Andrew Fletcher of Saltounhad been, and both considered slavery from the angle of its possible contributionto mercantile growth. The antipathy to what was called "commerce" in the eigh-teenth century arose, it must always be remembered, along two main lines ofdevelopment. It was feared that men might become in various ways dependentthrough overspecialization, as they had been tempted to entrust their indepen-dent virtue to professional soldiers, governors, patrons, or — it was increasinglyperceived — employers. The yeoman living off the produce of his farm was arche-typally immune from this corruption, but that did not preclude the possibilityof independence through exchange relations; the yeoman took his goods to mar-ket, the serf delivered them to his lord as payment in kind. The independence of

139 G e r a l d S t o u r z h , Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Calif . , 1970) .140 Lance B a n n i n g , The Jeffersonian Persuasion.141Appleby, cited in n. 73, this chapter. The best recent work on this question is Drew R. McCoy,

The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N .C. , 1980).


the small entrepreneur appeared in American values as an outgrowth of the in-dependence of the small farmer,142 and even the growth of water-powered millindustry in New England was idealized in terms of rustic independence and vir-tue. The pieceworker and his capitalist employer presented a graver problem inmutual corruption and interdependence — especially when they created a newtype of urban environment - and Jefferson was concerned with the problem ofhow far his society should advance beyond domestic to factory manufactures. Atall levels, independence and specialization remain the theme, and the workmansees himself as independent artisan rather than as proletarian struggling to tran-scend his overspecialization.

The second line of thought, which must never be lost to sight, is that "com-merce" in the eighteenth century was held to entail the presence of an aristocracy:the Whig aristocracy Hamilton was accused of wishing to reintroduce to Amer-ica. As late as 1813—14, John Taylor of Caroline unhesitatingly characterized as"capitalists" the privileged rulers of an aristocratic mode of government, per-fected in Britain during the previous century and still threatening the virtuousagriculture (at once scientific and slaveholding, improving and Catonian) of whichhe was the advocate.143 The ghost of the monied interest still walked, and it wasa question of historical circumstance whether the improving landowner felt im-pelled to embrace the Whig aristocracy in Scotland or reject it in Virginia. Thevalues of market society, which could reinforce yeoman independence in one setof circumstances, could be employed (as Tucker demonstrates) to reinforce theWhig order in another, and it does not seem to be a coincidence that Madisonand Hamilton have been identified as students of Hume,144 whereas it was Jef-ferson who wanted to exorcise him from the American mind. Hamilton, whowanted strong government and commercial empire, would be attracted by Hume'sthoughts on the relation between liberty and authority and on how men were tolive freely under government in a world where commerce counted for more thanvirtue. But though the American future might belong to Hamiltonian practice,it belonged to Jeffersonian ideology.145 There is not to be found anything likethe ideology of regime Whiggism, in which a modernizing aristocracy is rein-

142 Rowland T. Berthoff, "Independence and Attachment, Virtue and Interest: From RepublicanCitizen to Free Enterpriser, 1787—1837," in Uprooted Americans, Essays to Honor Oscar Handlin, ed.Richard L. Bushman (Boston, 1979).

143 J o h n Tay lo r , Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political ( P e t e r s b u r g , V a . ,1818; reprinted, Indianapolis, 1977), pp. 74, 79-81, 85, 98-110. In an Inquiry into the Principlesand Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), Taylor distinguished between "capital createdby industry" and "capital created by paper." "Capitalists" were those who robbed the former tocreate the latter and found a new species of aristocracy.

144 Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York; 1974).145 John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution

Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816)," in Pocock, ed., Three BritishRevolutions.


forced in possession of a strong executive government by the twin forces of com-merce and politeness. This is one reason why Scottish social thought has been solong misunderstood and Adam Smith set down as a rugged individualist. Thetremendous historical power of commerce was recognized and described in theeighteenth century as a soft, civilizing, and feminizing force, and in the nine-teenth as hard, heroic, and philistine: the gentle and the stern paideia.l46 Theadvent of industry has much to do with this, but so has the role of a commercialaristocracy, present in Britain but absent in America.

IV. From the response to the American Revolution tothe reaction to the French Revolution

Radical or patriot Whiggism in Britain and America confronted a Whig oligar-chy that both cultures characterized in the same terms, but Americans had to dowith it at a distance and feared it as a specter, whereas Britons encountered ithead on as part of their own world of experience and were obliged to hear andrespond to what was regularly said on its behalf. Once the "ministerial" armieshad been discouraged from attempting to reduce the colonies to obedience, thereexisted a space, if not a vacuum, that must be filled by extending — and, as itturned out, transforming — the republican intimations latent in Whig discourse.We have already begun to observe the reasons why this could never happen inBritain. There existed no vacuum; political space was already filled with thehistoric institutions of royal government and common law. The republican inti-mations of Whiggism called for a republic of separated powers, but where thecrown in Parliament already exercised a conjoint sovereignty, there could be noreal case for a classical republic, just as a few years later there was no point inraising the Jacobin cry for a republic one and indivisible. England (if not Britain)was one and indivisible already, aristocratic and corporate power notwithstand-ing, and the only serious Jacobins in the British Isles (to use that term) madetheir appearance in Ireland, where a republic one and indivisible had much tocommend it before and even after the rise of Orangeism. The sovereignty ofParliament being an effective fact, it might seem as if Commonwealth quasi-republicanism stood revealed as a historical blind alley, and indeed it may neverhave been the same after the American war. The Declaration of Independencewas a brutal slap in the face of those London radicals who had supposed that theAmerican cause was their own,147 and Richard Price and those like him werereduced to declaring that American independence was a punishment for British

146This phrase was coined by Marvin C. Becker, Florence in Transition, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1967-8).147 Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977).


guilt. The relations between the component powers in Parliament could not beremodeled along republican lines once the spectacle existed of the experimentbeing carried out in American reality — not that the American constitutionalexperiments of the 1780s seem to have attracted much British attention — andthe attempt to do so had always been largely a Tory affair. But, as we have alreadyseen, royal influence and aristocratic corruption had always been exposed to OldWhig and patriot denunciations, and since the days of the First Whigs it hadbeen held that the remedy for such things lay in more frequent parliaments anda reform of the representation. Before the American crisis became an Americanwar, these habitual slogans were being developed into serious proposals for fran-chise reform, abolition of boroughs, and even manhood suffrage, and the elector-ate was being presented as not only a repository of republican virtue and Lockeanpower, but as a necessary and essential component in a political and social bal-ance. If British radicalism could not significantly take a republican route, it couldtake a democratic one. The democratization of politics could occur on both sidesof the Atlantic, but in the American republic the representation of the peoplebecame a mode of sovereign democracy, whereas in Britain the representation ofthe realm, with which the sovereign monarchy consulted to render its sovereigntyeffective, became a representation of the people. Even this took a long time.

Because British republican and democratic radicalism encountered an aristo-cratic oligarchy entrenched in control of a parliamentary system to which noalternative was possible, there could never be a republican revolution but mustbe a reform of Parliament. To say this, however, is not to say, as some havesupposed, that British radicalism was a tame and reformist affair compared withthe revolutionary daring of the Americans.148 Nothing like the creative consti-tutional experimenting of the Founding Fathers is indeed to be found, but theexperience of the next fifty years in exacting parliamentary reform from the oli-garchy was tougher and more embittering than any undergone by the Americans,and it is possible to imagine that it might have led to more revolutionary conclu-sions. To smash and replace crown and Parliament, shire and borough, wouldhave been as totally transforming a revolution as the smashing and replacementof the ancien regime, and there have always been British revolutionary dreamerswho wonder what it would have been like.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,Our wrath come after Russia's wrath, and our wrath be the worst.149

But this seems to be dreaming against the facts. The strength of Whig andconservative interpretations of British history continues to lie in the general truth

148 A view attributed to the present writer by Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, p. 174, and"Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes, " p. 2.

149G. K. Chesterton (scarcely a man of the left), in "The Secret People."


that no revolutionary alternative to the democratization of Parliament has everbeen taken seriously, and it has remained plausible that the Whig regime, evenat its most oligarchic, possessed a liberal flexibility that the ancien regime lacked.It can further be maintained that because the oligarchic regime disposed of pow-erful and articulate ideologies in which both its ancient and its modern charactercould be asserted and defended — rhetorics that ranged from the ancient consti-tution to the Wealth of Nations — the ideological debate in counterrevolutionaryBritain was of a depth and texture unknown in revolutionary America. ThomasPaine, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Wil-liam Blake, Thomas Malthus, William Cobbett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, andJames Mill form a gallery of radicals, conservatives, and revolutionaries hard toimagine in a simpler and more spacious world. America might produce prophets,but few dialecticians appeared until Tocqueville arrived to tell the republic whatit was becoming. This is not being said to score points in a World Cup forpolitical thinkers, but rather to establish the premise that a history of "the vari-eties of Whiggism" still has a long way to go.

Two authentic revolutionaries took part in the Anglo-American debate of themid-1770s: Jean Paul Marat, a Frenchman resident in London, and Thomas Paine,an Englishman just arrived in Philadelphia. The former wrote a rather conven-tional radical Whig tract that he had to revise considerably to make into a FrenchRevolution manifesto years later.150 The latter remains difficult to fit into anykind of category. Common Sense breathes an extraordinary hatred of English gov-erning institutions, but it does not consistently echo any established radical vo-cabulary; Paine had no real place in the club of Honest Whigs to which Franklinhad introduced him in London, and his use of anti-Normanism to insist thatBritain did not have a constitution but rather a tyranny does not permit us tothink of him (as contemporaries might have) as a New Model soldier risen fromthe grave. Moreover, when the Revolutionary War was over Paine returned tolive under "the royal brute of Great Britain" as if nothing much had happened,nor was he pursued by the authorities until the very different circumstances of1791- One of the few practicing revolutionaries in English history, he performedno independent revolutionary action in England; his appearance on the scene,however, does indicate that things were beginning to happen for which neitherbranch of the Whig mainstream could properly account. In 1776, the year ofCommon Sense, there appeared Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, the firstshot in a long guerre de course against the ancient constitution, the balanced gov-ernment, the common law, and all the icons of regime Whiggism as voiced bythe latest of its expositors, Sir William Blackstone. In the same year, however,

150Luciano Guerci, "Marat prima della Rivoluzione: Le Catene della Schiavitu, " Rivista Storka ItalianaXCI, 2 - 3 (1979), pp. 434-69 . The Chains of Slavery was Marat's title in 1774, Les Cha'tnes deI'Esdavage in 1793-


Bentham seems to have taken a hand in writing a government-sponsored rebuttalof the Declaration of Independence.151 There was nothing venal about him andit is far too early to be speaking of Philosophic Radicalism or of Bentham as aradical of any kind; but no man and no tradition was his master. Some programfor scientific legislation was already in the young man's mind, but his indifferenceto constitutional debate was all but absolute. We may do best to think of Ben-tham as a kind of conservative Jacobin, a bureaucratic reformer indifferent tohistory, but altogether without revolutionary aspirations or opportunities; yet weshould not try to document, what this might otherwise suggest, an affinity withWalpolean or Scottish modernism — the rhetoric of modernism was Whig andhis was not. The parameters within which occurred the mutation of discoursethat produced him and his mind are hard to establish and seem not to belong tothe history of English public debate. Like Paine, but like him only in this,Bentham concealed his origins if he had any.

The established patterns of radical speech and action outlasted the Declarationof Independence, and Herbert Butterfield in 1949 found it possible to character-ize 1780 as the year of "the revolution that did not happen."152 He came underconsiderable fire for doing so: Whig historians believe that revolution is pre-cluded by the structure of English institutions, and Namierite historians find itdifficult to believe that political beings ever think or act in a revolutionary man-ner. To say that no one intended revolution in 1780 is in a sense to beg thequestion, since revolutions are commonly conducted by those who had no inten-tion of doing so; but without climbing into the cumulonimbus of the counterfac-tual, we can say that in 1780 there were those who knew that revolution mightoccur. The attempt made in that year to combine the petitioning activities ofLondon and Middlesex radicals with those of Yorkshire gentlemen and freehold-ers suggests the classic formula for a country movement combining urban withrural discontent; in the highly traditional Old Whig and ancient-constitutional-ist rhetoric which the movement employed may be discerned elements ofthe notion that the uncorrupt people may assemble, associate, and petition —petitioning was often a tumultuous activity — in order to bring about reform ofa corrupt parliament. This was also the year of the Convention at Dungannon,when a virtuous militia assembled in arms to bring about — peaceably, it is true— a renewal of Irish parliamentary life (a revolution in the ancient sense of theterm). It never became clear how far, supposing Parliament to be corrupt, anational convention could proceed through parliamentary channels or must sub-stitute itself for them, and in the world as it looked after 1789, the charge ofpromoting a national convention was to become that of promoting revolution in

151 Douglas Long, Bentham on Liberty: Jeremy Bentham's Idea of Liberty in Relation to his Utilitarianism(Toronto, 1977), pp. 51-4.

152 H e r b e r t Bu t t e r f i e ld , George III, Lord North and the People, 1779-80.


the French or most modern sense of the word. Long before that, however, Britishand Irish patriot radicalism appeared to have shot its bolt. The Yorkshire move-ment failed; the Patriot Parliament ran itself into futility; the Gordon riots stirredup all the governing class's latent fears of religious enthusiasm. "Forty thousandPuritans as they might have been in the time of Cromwell," wrote Gibbon, "havestarted out of their graves."153 The election of 1784, however it came about, inretrospect appeared to mean that the monarchy, the oligarchy, and the gentryhad closed ranks and were prepared to distinguish ever more stringently betweenthe reforms they were ready to concede and those they were not.

If we date the British counterrevolution from 1784, without waiting for themassive reaction against the news from France, we may take into account certainideological indications of a hardening of attitude. Blackstone's successor in theVinerian professorship had come out unequivocally for "a high doctrine of sover-eign authority, in framing which Samuel Johnson may have taken a hand.154 Inthe domain of philosophy, the reality of divine will and the autonomy of moralvalues were being asserted in terms calculated to reinforce the authority of soci-ety; the advent of Scottish commonsense philosophy and the rapid adoption ofWilliam Paley's writings into the Cambridge curriculum are instances of this.There is an audible sternness and an unwillingness to accept opposition as legit-imate, which suggests that the oligarchy was losing its tolerance for quasi-repub-lican alternative programs; leaders of the aristocracy who found themselves inopposition might have to decide quickly whether to endorse or reject radicalplans. This may have been a crucial moment in the reflective as well as the activecareer of Edmund Burke. Between 1781 and 1784 it became clear that he wouldhave no part in proposals to enlarge the franchise. Thomas Reid and WilliamPaley, nevertheless, were liberal as well as conservative philosophers, and Burkedid not base his theoretical opposition to enlargement of the franchise on anyintransigently modernist claim that the constitution had assumed its final formin 1688 or 1714 and could not thereafter be reformed. Rather, he affirmed thatthe constitution was prescriptive and immemorial, and that therefore it was con-ceptually impossible to speak either of natural rights it disregarded or of originalrights from which it had fallen away.155 The bedrock of ancient constitutionalismwas being laid at the foundations of the prescriptive conservatism to which Burkewould give classic expression a few years later and which, at a first and even asecond reading, seems very remote from the Scottish scientific Whiggism hith-erto an intellectual pillar of the post-Walpolean order. One would give much for

153J. E. Norton, ed., The Letters of Edward Gibbon, 3 vols. (London, 1956), vol. II, p. 243.1541 refer here to Sir Robert Chambers, whose subsequent career lay in India; for his association with

Johnson see W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York, 1975), pp. 417-26 . Johnson certainlyhelped with the writing and may have advised on the argument.

155Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971), pp. 226-8 .


a report of the conversations that took place when Burke dined with Millar inGlasgow and with Smith in Edinburgh; the young William Windham, however,found his faculties not clear next morning.156

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The impact of the French Revolution between 1789 and 1793 brought about adisintegration and regrouping among the Whigs: one, to speak more precisely,in which a relatively organized entity known as the Whig party lost contact withseveral great Whig connections but contrived to retain its name. Whether theGrenville and Portland connections ceased being Whigs, and if so what they weresaid to have become, is a question we may consider. Whatever the high politicsof these occurrences,157 their history in the fields of ideology and discourse mayconveniently be recounted from the obvious point: the publication of Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. Burke was spurred to write this byhearing of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, which presented themarch to Versailles in October 1789 and the conducting of the French royalfamily to Paris as glorious events in keeping with the spirit of the English Rev-olution of 1688. If we ask what Price was doing when he delivered this address,part of the answer must be that his rhetoric may well have been 'Vulgar Whig"but was not Old Whig in the Commonwealthman sense. It was aimed at a king,not a king's ministers, and proclaimed that kings — in England, France, or nature— might be cashiered for misconduct: a doctrine of conditional rule and popularsovereignty, which paradoxically formed no part of the language that affirmedthe separation and balance of the component parts of the constitution. Price maywell have believed that he was preaching a Lockean sermon, and Josiah Tuckerwould caustically have agreed; there is a problem ex silentio in the circumstancethat Burke at no time saw fit to mention Locke's name in this connection. He sethimself, however, to repudiate what was certainly a radical Whig interpretationof the events of 1688—9, and there is evidence that, much like Tucker some yearsearlier, he saw Price as an agent of the earl of Shelburne.158 There was a conspir-acy afoot, both conservatives agreed, to damage the monarchy by using 1688 toassert natural rights of limitation and deposition, and Tucker had seen this as thework of aristocratic desperadoes conducting an ideological fronde. After Burke'sconduct in the regency crisis, he was ill placed to defend himself had any such

156 The Diary of the Rt. Hon. William Windham (London, 1866), pp. 6 0 - 1 , 63-4: "Felt very stronglythe impressions of a company entirely Scotch. Faculties not clear."

157 For w h i c h see O ' G o r m a n , Whig Party and the French Revolution, w h o never neg lec t s t h e factor ofbelief.

158Thomas W. Copeland, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1967); vol.VI, pp. 91-2 .


charge been made; but his attitude toward aristocratic Whiggism was more com-plex than Tucker's.

Tucker and Burke both had recourse to an interpretation of 1688 so character-istic of regime Whiggism as to savor paradoxically of the arguments used byRevolution Tories. That is, they argued that the Revolution had been an act ofnecessity and had not established any general right to repeat the actions of whichit had consisted. To avoid the extremes of arguing either that it established aright of deposition or that it set up a merely de facto regime, it must be arguedthat the act of necessity was performed within a framework of historic constitu-tionality that had not been dissolved. Here, however, the arguments pressed byTucker and Burke, in each case against Price, must be said to have diverged.Tucker was a modernist of much the same school as Hume; he saw the principlesof constitutional liberty as recent in their formation, and the acts of 1688 and1689 as important contributions to giving them shape. He saw the reliance onabstract natural right, of which he suspected Price, as implying a violent repu-diation of the processes of history, by which commerce was bringing a free andordered society into existence. Burke on the other hand had already subscribedto the view that the constitution was immemorial and prescriptive; he could joinhands with Coke and Blackstone in presenting the men of 1688 as acting withinthe framework of the ancient constitution and the confirmatio cartarum,159 and thehistory to which natural right did violence was a process of gradual adaptationand piety toward precedents, far more natural and prudential and less dynamicthan those isolated by the theorists of scientific Whiggism, of whom Tucker wasone. Those who had acted out of necessity were seen to have acted out of reverencetoward precedent and custom.

Burke established a rhetoric of prescriptive conservatism with such intellectualpower and religious conviction, and found so large a public willing to endorse it- even Gibbon, to his slight dismay, found himself a true believer160 - that hebade fair to displace Scottish social theory from its role as the chief ideologicalsupport of the Whig order. This does not mean, however, that he was eitherindifferent or hostile to it. As his understanding of the European civility threat-ened by the French Revolution developed and intensified, he saw that civilityincreasingly as an edifice of manners and morality resting on a foundation incommerce: precisely the theory advanced by Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon,looking back to the age of Addison, Shaftesbury, and the philosophers of polite-ness. That the Whig order, as part of this civility, was based on a union of landand commerce Burke had no doubt whatever, and he held that the virtue of thestate was displayed in the management of its revenue. But the management of

159 Not much had in fact been said about Magna Carta in 1689. Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights,pp. 195-6.

160Norton, ed., Letters of Edward Gibbon, vol. Ill, p. 216.


Whig commerce must be in aristocratic hands, and Burke found increasing rea-son to fear the emergence of a "middle class" no longer responsive to their pa-tronage and leadership. It was not, however, the entrepreneurial activity of thisclass that he feared or saw as directing their behavior, but rather their energy,their enthusiasm, and their unbridled capacity to form associations; the category"bourgeoisie" may be imposed on his thought but cannot be directly elicitedfrom it. For these reasons, although he continued to accept and proclaim thecivilizing power of commerce, he declared as early as the Reflections that commercestood in need of its own history. It did not negate the feudal honor or the eccle-siastical piety and learning that had preceded it, and to destroy these — as arevolutionary monied interest and intelligentsia were doing in France — was todestroy commerce and civilization themselves. Burke's intellectual solution tothe challenge presented by revolution was to enlarge scientific Whiggism in thedirection of a deeper historicism; his common-law concern for custom and prec-edent and his Whig commitment to aristocratic manners and politeness havesomehow to be fitted into this context.

As has been indicated in the preceding chapter, the point at which his thoughtcomes closest to breaking with the Whig tradition to which he deeply belongedwas that at which he articulated his concern for clerisy. Burke's religiosity — hisawareness of the sacred, of the need for transcendent moral sanctions — was realalthough its roots do not seem to lie in direct religious experience; but to theneed for a clergy to preach the discipline of transcendence he added the need ofone to further that of manners through the maintenance of learning. Here hestruck a chord which was Tory and Laudian rather than Whig and latitudinarian;Whigs knew that there must be polite manners and that the clergy had a role toplay in furthering them, but they emphatically did not think — in the traditionof Anglican critics of Henry VIII — that there could be no manners without thelearning of an established, beneficed, and landed church. Burke was to persuademany of them that there was such a necessity, but it may have been these amonghis disciples who found that they had become Tories in a real sense of the word.By denying that culture was dependent on commerce, and affirming the possi-bility of the converse relationship, he radically modified an important premise ofscientific Whiggism, and in suggesting that a class brought into being by com-merce might destroy itself by attacking the clerical foundations of culture he gaveexpression to a new problem in social theory. The barbarian was known; he ex-isted before the growth of commerce had made culture possible. But what was tobe said of the philistine, who existed after the relation between culture and com-merce had become possible but who denied that it was a necessary one? Burke'sdemonic men of energy, destroying the framework of manners in the pursuit ofpower, are examples of what is meant; they appear within the process of historybut almost as its negation. Later, however, it was increasingly felt that the growth


of commerce might produce a class without manners or culture, and this was toform part of the conventional meaning of the term "bourgeoisie." The process ofhistory itself must be reexamined in this light, and at the point where Burke'srevision of perspectives forces scientific Whiggism to redefine itself as Tory standsColeridge's Constitution of the Church and State,161 a study of how a static landedand a dynamic commercial class must discipline themselves by endowing a clerisycharged with the perpetuation of culture. Coleridge's American disciples, how-ever — such as there were of them — called themselves Whigs.162

Burke's immediate intention was to demolish the claim that the English Rev-olution of 1688 might be read in such a way as to provide justification for theFrench Revolution of 1789, and thus to assimilate the former event to thelatter. Because he was an imaginative and neurotic genius, Burke saw, bothrightly and wrongly, very much further than that; he recognized the Revolutionin France as an event of vast ideological importance and endeavored to diagnoseand resist it by far-reaching ideological statements. As regards actions his coun-trymen might or might not perform, however, he does not seem to have lookedmuch further, initially at least, than the attempt to assimilate the two revolutionsand justify the latter one; yet this issue was to prove sufficient to fragment theWhig political groupings along ideological lines that are by no means identicalwith those denning the fissure between regime and Commonwealth Whiggismthat has concerned us so far. A number of problems meet us here. The myth ofthe French Revolution is of course no myth; it was instantly recognized as anevent that transformed — in some minds it came to constitute — world history,and people in many political cultures found themselves living in terms of theirresponses to it. Yet the Revolution did not instantly assimilate all other politicalcultures into its categories, and English political culture was singularly idiosyn-cratic, tough, and resistant. English radicalism, no less than the defense of theruling system, was as we have seen possessed of many idioms for expressing itsvalues and demands, and these did not instantly disappear with the news fromthe Bastille and Versailles. We should therefore ask the question — and seek toanswer it in terms of a serious theory of speech and discourse — exactly whyradicals in England found it necessary to interpret French events as expressingtheir demands, and state their values in terms congruent with French discourseas they understood it. This program is probably too ambitious to be undertakenhere. As regards Price, the Burkean diagnosis (i.e., that Price was abstractingconcepts from one tradition of discourse and imposing them as criteria on allpolitical societies whatever) is plausible as far as it goes, but carries more than

161 On the Constitution of the Church and State according to the Idea of Each (London, 1830).162The most recent studies are Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs

(Chicago, 1979), and Jean V. Matthews, Rufus Choate: The Law and Civic Virtue (Philadelphia,1980).


one meaning. Burke condemned Price as a political rationalist, or as he called ita "metaphysician": one who would construct a theory and then use it to judge,sentence, and transform all practice. Burke had already brought this charge againstEnglish reformers, and Tucker earlier still had leveled it against Price himself. Itwould be useful to determine whether Price was guilty as charged, after whichwe would be free to determine that it was not necessarily a crime. Historicallyspeaking, had a habit of arguing in the way described established itself in thediscourse of English radical intellectuals, whether inclined to Platonism like Priceor to associationism like Priestley?163

The notion of abstraction can be applied in another way. If we think of Englishradical sympathizers with the French Revolution as engaged in a species of com-parative politics — as asserting that the speech and actions of the French had basesin common with their own speech and action — it is evident that this wouldentail an exercise in translation, and translating concepts from one mode of speechinto another cannot be done without abstracting them, when it is easy to assertthat they possess multicontextual if not universal significances. It was Mackin-tosh's complaint that Burke's language was so English as to leave no terms inwhich it was possible to understand scientifically what the French had been doing.164

If we employ the concept of translation, however, we are once again affirmingthat the English had a discourse of their own, after which we must ask why theyfound it necessary to assimilate it to French discourse; exactly what was per-formed when English radicals addressed each other as "Citizen"? And if we affirmthat English radical discourse possessed a continuing validity not identical withthat possessed by the French,165 we must sooner or later ask the question: Exactlyhow Jacobin were the English Jacobins? When it was suggested in the precedingessay that Burke feared the English radicals and dissenters less as revolutionariesthan as fellow travelers,166 the intention was to raise the problem of translation;for the fellow traveler is preeminently one who asserts that the parameters of aneighboring politics are relevant to, and more significant than, those of his own,yet does not leave his politics to inhabit those to which he refers himself. Trans-lation entails the problem of the double standard; every one of those who repliedto Burke's Reflections declared that the French must not be judged harshly foractions performed in the overthrow of despotism, but if this meant that theymust be judged by standards intelligible to themselves, the mere fact that En-glishmen did not fully comprehend them meant that they must judge the French

163 For this dimension of the difference between the two men see Jack G. Fruchtman, The ApocalypticPolitics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (Philadelphia, 1982).

164See pp. 297-8.165 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964), and a plentiful

literature of articles and monographs.166 See also R o b e r t L. Dozie r , For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French

Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1983), p. 69-


either less or more severely than they could ever judge themselves. This per-plexity now entered political discourse as a constant and has never left it.

We are circling around the problem and have returned to the point of recog-nizing that Englishmen for all their idiosyncrasy of culture did evaluate theiractions with reference to the pretensions of the French. This, which had movedPrice to speak and Burke to write, is highly relevant to the fragmentation thatnow overtook the Whigs. Between 1789 and 1793 the followers of Charles JamesFox moved away from Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution and intoopposition to Pitt's policy of making war against it. Because they possessed apolitical organization167 and a newspaper that were in the habit of using thephrase "the Whig party," they were able to arrogate the label "Whig" to them-selves, and it was possible for the Morning Chronicle to announce that "the greatbody of the Whigs of England" had sat in judgment on the disputes betweenBurke and Fox and pronounced in the latter's favor; "the consequence is that Mr.Burke retires from parliament." Burke, who found this kind of party disciplineas uncongenial as many still do, retorted with An Appeal from the New to the OldWhigs. The title is at variance with the terminology we have been using: Burke's"Old Whigs" are in fact the great families constituting the "Old Corps" of Whigs,and in particular their Revolution ancestors, whereas his "New" are still in manyways the heirs of the Old (True, Real, Independent, Honest) Whigs of the Com-monwealth tradition.168 The Appeal essays once more to demonstrate that theRevolution of 1688 was the antithesis of that of 1789, and the foundations itdiscovers for the dethroning of James II and the impeachment of Henry Sachev-erell are, if anything, more consonant with the thinking of Revolution Toriesthan are those laid down in the Reflections. Regime Whiggism had long sinceabsorbed Revolution Toryism and made it its own, but perhaps we have here oneclue to the curious change that at some point overcame the term "Tory" andmade it applicable to the great Whig families who took Pitt's path and alsoBurke's. The motives that led Fox to stand out in opposition to the war withFrance cannot be too simply stated;169 among them may have been the feelingthat the radical associations offered a power base still necessary to him, but weknow also that he continued to see the policies of the crown and its ministers as"Tory," in the Bolingbrokean sense that they aimed to use royal influence tobreak up aristocratic associations. This would be the normal way of using theterm; there is an evident sense of paradox in the remark made a few years later

1670'Gorman, Whig Party and the French Revolution, pp. 12-31.168O'Gorman shows clearly that Burke's terminology was not idiosyncratic; the equation Old Whigs/Old

Corps was perhaps more current than the use of "Old Whig" in a "Commonwealth" sense. Healso shows that Burke's publication was by no means welcomed by the Old Whigs to whom heappealed; as usual, he seemed to them too strident.

169O'Gorman, Whig Party and the French Revolution; Herbert Butterfield, "Charles James Fox and theWhig Opposition, 1792," Cambridge HistoricalJournal IX, 3 (1949), pp. 293-330.


that the French Revolution "had made Gibbon a Christian and Windham aTory."170 But the word could also be used to denote more generally a supporterof the crown and its policies, as to Americans it had meant a supporter of royalauthority exercised in Parliament. Nothing could be more Whiggish than theGrenvilles and Portlands who now rallied to support Pitt and the war with France;nothing could be more Whiggish than the existing parliamentary and ecclesias-tical structures, reform of which came to be demanded by those who were op-posed to the war. It is not yet fully understood by what stages the word "Tory"came, whether in contemporary or in historians' parlance, to be applied to sternunbending defenders of the Septennial Act, the Toleration Act, and the nationaldebt.

The Foxite Whigs' decision to oppose the war with France reopened a problemclosely akin to that of fellow traveling. What came to be termed "antipolemic"(meaning antiwar) argument could be, and was, expressed in language datingfrom the Queen Anne Tories: A war in Europe with subsidized allies corruptedthe body politic; it multiplied patronage, pensions, honors, standing armies, andthe national debt. Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; the Common-wealth voice was as audible as that of the country, and both remained so for thenext twenty years. But at the same time the war was an ideological conflict,fought against what Burke was to term an armed doctrine; to oppose it, therefore,was to declare it as doctrinaire as its adversary and to place its opponents in theposition of those who were above ideologies, or could choose between them with-out choosing either. This was more than ever the case when it appeared that thewar must go on until monarchy was restored to France, and involved repressivemeasures against ideological dissentients at home, not all of whom succeeded inavoiding subversive actions. Quite unlike the opposition in the War of the Span-ish Succession or even the American Revolution, the opposition to the Revolu-tionary and (with modifications) the Napoleonic Wars was in the predicament ofa principled opposition to a principled war. It might very laudably oppose anideological crusade that had become repressive of domestic liberties; yet once theopposition suggested that the ideological hostility of the adversary in the war wasnot so harmful as domestic repression, it was unclear what standards it was usingto criticize the adversary, and it could be accused, without being certain of itsreply, of thinking a few treason trials at home worse than a reign of terror or amilitary despotism abroad. Intelligent critics were aware of this problem, andwhen Napoleon seemed to have converted the war into one against tyranny, orthe Spanish risings into a war for popular liberties, the critics could adjust theirposition without losing their principles; yet the problem of the double standardwas almost structurally inescapable, as was that of the apparent defeatism that170Paul Turnbull, "The Supposed Infidelity of Edward Gibbon," Historical JournalXXVI, 1 (1982),

pp. 23-42. Quoted from Lord Glenbervie's diary.


arose when one doubted the military prospects of a war because one disapprovedof its moral foundations. What Americans might term the Copperhead role doggedthe antiwar Whigs to the end of the Hundred Days, and even William Cobbett,who was more like John Bull than most Englishmen, was habitually defeatistregarding the war in the Peninsula.17 x

Those who opposed the French wars were almost without exception patriots asthe term was used in the nineteenth century (very differently, as we have seen,from its use in the prerevolutionary era to denote one whose ostensible concernfor public virtue carried him to the point of republicanism). Their loyalty was tothe national community and its values, and if they doubted the country's rightto victory they did not desire its defeat. Yet there were those who, without doinganything to ensure defeat, spoke as if they expected it — as if the shortcomingsof the regime ensured that it would and should fail; they began with a laudabledesire to understand the enemy's point of view and ended by hero-worshippingNapoleon as their successors would Stalin. It is desirable, though it will not bewelcome,172 to dwell on this, because we are dealing with the origins of what hasbecome an integral part of modern political culture.

From the age of the counterrevolutionary wars A. J. P. Taylor has traced thelineage of "trouble-makers" and "dissenters" (as he uses the terms), who objectless to the misuse than to the use of national power, because they operate bymoral standards that must always condemn it.173 Richard Price was among thefirst of them, and it is tempting to explain them along Burkean lines: they erectthe community's morals into a standard of theory by which its practice can onlybe condemned. But we must add to this by comprehending that these antipa-triots were the heirs of the "patriots" so denned by eighteenth-century usage: the"Mock Patriots" as Tucker splenetically called them. Where the patriot followedpublic virtue to the point of rejecting his country's institutions, the antipatriotfollows moral virtue to the point of rejecting his country's community. To thepatriot in the modern or postrevolutionary sense, his country is his country rightor wrong, and he is tempted to pronounce it always right. The antipatriot istempted to pronounce it always wrong, because his notion of a country is acongregation engaged in moral censure and admonition, but ruled by politicianswhose corruption is taken for granted. Tucker and Burke witnessed, and in theireyes Price personified, the formation of this mentality, which came about whenthe Old Whig and Nonconformist consciences were unified in the presence of theideological problem imposed upon discourse by the revolution in France. Burkeoverstated but did not altogether misstate the case when he declared that the

1 7 G e o r g e Spater , William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend, 2 vols. (Cambr idge , 1982).172 Con tempora ry w r i t i n g about radicalism and repression in these years main ta ins a h igh tempera-

ture. The present writer finds popular discontent and popular patriotism equally understandable.173 A. J . P. Taylor, The Trouble-Makers: Dissent Over Foreign Policy 1792-1939 (London, 1957).


opposition to the French war marked the end of patriotism as he had known it.The antiwar intelligentsia had been born, with their moral certainties, their dou-ble standards, and their love of vicarious capitulation. To that extent it was anew world.

A deservedly more benign - though in no way uncritical - account of thesepeople has been given by J. E. Cookson.174 He emphasizes their role in thedevelopment of nineteenth-century middle-class liberalism and the Nonconform-ist conscience, terms that go together in consequence of the predominant degreeto which the antiwar movement was rooted in the radical Unitarian associationsof the 1780s. He is thus enabled to bring out the essentially ecclesiastical char-acter of the terms "Tory" and "liberal" at the beginning of their modern history.From the time of the first petitions for the relief of Dissenters from civil disabil-ities, a "Tory" came to mean one who insisted that a Toleration Act and a TestAct were interdependent, and that the Revolution Settlement implied a highdegree of identity between the political nation and an established church. Most"Tories" in this sense were or had been Whigs, and it can even be doubtedwhether Burke, with his support for the relief of Irish Catholics, would havequalified for the term. A "liberal" thinker, on the other hand, was one whoadvocated a religion of free inquiry and speculation, and for this reason heldreligious freedom to entail an equality of civic rights. Though other meaningsattached themselves with varying degrees of rapidity, it was long before the word"liberalism" took on the full range of political meanings, and longer still beforeit took on the full range of economic meanings, with which we now burden it.

Dr. Cookson's "liberals" were before anything else an antiwar movement, andhe gives ample detail of the extent to which their opposition to war was anopposition to aristocratic control of a military and financial state, couched in theestablished language of attack on a monied interest. It follows that their criti-cisms were directed, much as were those of their Jeffersonian contemporaries inthe United States, against a military and financial, even more than a landed,aristocracy; they did not need to echo, but would have fully endorsed, the Amer-ican contention that the former sort of aristocracy would infallibly engender thelatter. This is the context in which we should read their incessant praise of the"middle classes" as composed of self-reliant men of enterprise. They knew, astheir peers in New England and the mid-Atlantic states were coming to know,that they were living in a society in which commercial relations were more andmore preponderating over agrarian relations; but they acclaimed the investor ofpersonal property in precisely the same language, and for precisely the sameindependence and virtue as opposed to corruption, as their neo-Harringtonianforebears had deployed in acclaiming the master of real property in land. In

174 The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge, 1982).


America if not in Britain, it is possible to discover antebellum Whigs who fol-lowed John Taylor in reserving the term "capitalism" for a system of publicfinance controlled by an aristocracy,175 and in Britain we may allow ourselves tothink of the later differences between northern and midland industry and Londonand Westminster banking.176 There is a case for seeing praise of the individualentrepreneur as the country ideology of capitalism.

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Adopting language originally framed to excoriate the Whig order for which hestood, Burke had diagnosed the French Revolution as the conspiracy of a moniedinterest, aimed at establishing a new kind of despotism on the dissolution bypower and paper of all the natural ties among men — including, of course, thenatural ties of commerce. Paine retorted by directing this language back into itshistoric channels; he denounced the war against the Revolution as the conspiracyof a boroughmongering and patronage-wielding aristocracy, aimed at perpetuat-ing the system of paper money and public credit on which its power rested. Inthe second part of The Rights of Man he outlined a scheme for democratic controlof the fiscal structure and the institution of systems of worker insurance. TheFrench Revolution had in a sense been a national and democratic takeover of thedebts of the French crown, and schemes like Paine's, but even more ambitious,were being propounded by such as Linguet.177 In English terms, we may readPart II of The Rights of Man as marking a decisive move away from any dream ofa merely rustic, republican, or Anglo-Saxon democracy; revolutionaries must seizethe credit of the state because they lived in a world that credit had transformed.Yet Paine's starting point (and in this respect Burke's) was in the country andCommonwealth denunciation of the credit structure, which continued to carrywith it idealizations of the independence of the small proprietor, and quasi-Harringtonian democratic Utopias continued to be constructed by Spence andothers; to seize the credit structure might be to perpetuate, to transform, or toabolish it. Paine wrote several prophecies of the imminent collapse of Britisharistocratic war finance, and it was one of these that caught the eye of that quin-tessentially country democrat William Cobbett, during his second American so-

175 Rush Welter, The Mind of America, 1820-1860 (New York; 1975). For an interesting account ofJoseph Priestley in his Pennsylvania years, seeking to reconcile the militia ideal with the idea of acommercial society, see Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in AmericanSociety to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill; N.C., 1982).

1 7 6 W . D . R u b i n s t e i n , " W e a l t h , Eli tes and t h e Class S t ruc ture of M o d e r n B r i t a i n , " Past and Present

LXXVI (1977), pp. 99-126; and with reservations, Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and theDecline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981).

177Darlene Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet: A Study in Eighteenth-CenturyFrench Politics (Urbana, 111., 1980).


journ in 1817—19, and caused him to exhume Paine's bones and bring them backto England as relics.178 To anyone but Cobbett it would have occurred - as toeveryone but Cobbett it immediately did — that he was also bringing back thebones of the author of The Age of Reason.

The point of the incident is that British radicalism, throughout the age ofcounterrevolutionary war, agrarian misery and rebellion, and industrial change,continued to be expressed in terms of a sustained attack on the Whig oligarchy,variously known as "Old Corruption" and "The Thing." Aristocratic control ofpolitics, patronage, and finance continued to be put forward as the root cause ofmoral evils such as corruption and material evils such as poverty; removal ofaristocratic control was seen as the prerequisite if not the ultimate goal of allreform. We know that the language in which Old Corruption was denned wasby this time a century old, and as much Tory as Whig in its origins and trans-mission; the time has now come to claim that it remained paradigmatic. Evenhad Cobbett been an isolated and eccentric exhibitionist, the depth of his in-debtedness to Paine would demand our attention, but the phenomenon has adeeper meaning. Both men were asserting, in the eighteenth-century tradition,that the credit structure must soon collapse under the weight of its increasingdebts, paper issues, and corruption; where Paine differed from Hume and Pricewas in his insistence that a national debt as such was benign and helped hold thenation together, and that only aristocratic mismanagement ensured disaster.179

Cobbett was so certain of disaster that he offered to be broiled on a gridiron if itdid not occur, and when Huskisson and others appeared to have held the systemin equilibrium Cobbett hoisted a gridiron over his newspaper offices, partly as agesture of defiance, partly as a declaration that if the financial apocalypse werenot now, yet it would come.180 The survival of the banking edifice through the1820s made two things possible. One was the 1832 reform of the parliamentarystructure by Whigs not acting on Commonwealth and country principles, a re-form celebrated by Macaulay as an assurance of economic health 2nd progress.The other was the sustained endeavor of Marx and many others to persuade theEnglish working classes that the causes of immiseration lay not in the aristocraticstructure of Old Corruption, but deeper within capitalism in the relations be-tween capital and labor. There is a sense in which Whig recovery and reformwere necessary conditions of Marx's intellectual system, and this is one reasonwhy Marxists tend to be Whig historians.

A Marxist analysis encourages us to look for the supersession of a politics basedon the confrontation between the oligarchy and its rural and urban opponents by

l78Spater, William Cobbett, vol. II, pp. 289-90, 313-16, 346-7, 376-9, 387, 556n. o.179 This may be traced as far back as Common Sense; see Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Major Writings

of Thomas Paine (Secaucus, N.J., 1974), p. 32.180Spater, William Cobbett, Vol. II, pp. 365, 413, 421, 424.


one based on that between two classes, one of employers and the other of workers,the one employing an ideology of the free market and the other an ideology ofthe exploitation of labor. We should indeed look for the emergence of both theseideologies, since it would seem that they did appear and the classes they presup-pose may have appeared also. But to write of them Whiggishly — on the suppo-sition that nothing matters except their appearance and that the transition fromone politics to the other was rapid and complete in proportion to its assumedsignificance - is to divert the historian of ideology from his proper task, that ofdiscovering and articulating the languages in which the inhabitants of an era didin fact present their society and cosmos to themselves and to each other. We havesupposed that a version of the entrenched radicalism of Commonwealth and coun-try presented the context in which — if not the matrix out of which — new radicallanguages must take shape; a sketch of the processes by which this occurred maybe offered if we examine some of the replies to Burke's Reflections, and some of theideologies that made their appearance soon after.

Paine's The Rights of Man is, of course, the most famous of these. It containedelements probably new and certainly unfamiliar in the context of Commonwealthand country radicalism, and these differentiate it from the reply to Burke writtenby that simon-pure representative of the old quasi-republican tradition, Cather-ine Macaulay;181 but we have also seen how Paine inspired Cobbett to perpetuatethe ideology that had Old Corruption at its center. Not all replies to Burke,however, were written by those Old Whigs whom he called New. Mary Woll-stonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man permits us to look toward that revo-lutionary rationalism in which William Godwin a few years later was to blend asecularized millennialism with elements of Locke and Rousseau,182 in a way thatTucker would have had no difficulty in recognizing. Wollstonecraft, however,had a quarrel of her own with Rousseau, which bore fruit in her far more strikingVindication of the Rights of Women; from the standpoint of the present volume,what is most noteworthy here is that the rights she claims for women are to thematerial means of independence and virtue, but that she further claims that themanners (and therefore the morals) of society need to be drastically revised beforethe virtues expected of women can be defined without profound falsity.

We are traveling away from the central and of course masculine structures ofEnglish and Scottish discourse, but a Rousseauist concern for the integrity ofpersonality in the confrontation with society — itself not distant from the familiarconcerns with virtue, corruption, and diversification — may serve to recall thatthere took shape at this time a kind of radicalism to which we attach the epithet"romantic." Godwin's early training as a Sandemanian makes us ask about the

181 C a t h e r i n e Macau lay (af terward G r a h a m ) , Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. EdmundBurke . . . in a letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London , 1790) .

182 Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London, 1980).


religious origins of his rationalism and reminds us at the same time that Whigpolitical culture unhesitatingly identified nearly all forms of radicalism as "en-thusiasm." Nor was this diagnosis necessarily mistaken. The path that led froman inner and personal religion to a rationalist and secular libertarian individual-ism had been pointed out and marked with warning signs by Hume, Tucker,and Burke, and there are hints that the immanentism and hermeticism of Mar-garet Jacob's Radical Enlightenment were emerging from below ground to takeshape in a rich variety of gnoses. It is not merely that the years of revolution andcounterrevolution were fertile in millennialisms and illuminisms;183 somethingeven deeper was happening. The two greatest system builders among Englishromantics are assuredly Blake and Coleridge. In the one we hear voices comingfrom very old and deep layers in the archaeology of heretical and antinomiancounterreligion, though some severance from these roots seems necessary in orderto account for Blake's need to invent his own mythology and nomenclature; onlygreat genius can make the difference between Golgonooza and Barsoom. In theother we encounter a scholarly endeavor, carried out at the levels of elite literacy,to uncover and recover what Coleridge claims to be the buried tradition of En-glish Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking, to which a return must be made if arevolution (or counterrevolution) is to be achieved.184 In both, we discover theinvention of a countermyth, to which Coleridge's Platonism and Blake's Ever-lasting Gospel were alike opposed: the myth that English thought had beendominated since the early seventeenth century by the succession of Bacon, Hobbes,Locke, and Newton, the cold mechanical philosophers of rationalist individual-ism. How far from historic reality this myth was should by now be evident; Whigsociety had been philosophically defended on grounds of its richness, fecundity,and diversity, its capacity to develop sentiment and sympathy, transaction andconversation, taste and science, the polite together with the mechanical arts. Itis not too much to say that commerce had been celebrated as poetry before it wasdenounced as pushpin. Yet Bentham and Mill were by now on the scene, andthere was clearly a case for regarding them — though they were not Whigs — ascold mechanical philosophers. The myth of "the single vision and Newton's sleep"answered some deep needs of the imagination, which is not to say that we shouldallow it to write our history for us. Of all the inventions of radical thought atthis period, it is the one most insistently and angrily maintained on right andleft at the present day.

The attack on the four philosophers of the single vision was intended as an183 C l a r k e G a r r e t t , Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Ba l -

t i m o r e , 1 9 7 5 ) ; W . H . O l i v e r , Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in Englandfrom the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland and Oxford, 1978); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming:Popular Millenarism 1780-1850 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980).

184 To indicate the growth of Coleridge's thought in footnotes is a dangerous task, but see particularlyThe Friend and On the Constitution of the Church and State, cited in note following.


attack on reigning Whig culture and reminds us that romantic radicalism, likeother radicalisms before it, flowed from both a republican and a Tory source; thismay help us understand the movement of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworthfrom republican youth to Tory old age, but it further complicates the meaningof the word "Tory" at a time when it was increasingly used to denote a last-ditchdefender of the Whig order. Burke, in his one major departure from the Whigmainstream, had declared that manners continued to rest on an ecclesiastical andchivalric foundation and had drawn upon Anglican tradition to present the clergy(or clerisy) as protectors of learning and culture; we saw how easily this could beturned into a criticism rather than a defense of the Whig aristocracy. A "Tory"in the post-Burkean sense might be one who sternly maintained that an estab-lished clergy was needed to preserve both moral and cultural discipline, but hewould have to believe (as many did) in the conjunction of the clergy with thelanded aristocracy and gentry in order to qualify as a conservative. If he did not,he might remain a Tory but would tend to become a radical: one who believed,in an enlargement of the Bolingbrokean tradition, that the gentry needed outsideassistance in order to uphold the values for which they stood. Bolingbroke hadseen a "patriot king" in this role, but it could be performed by a democracy, aclergy, or a clerisy. By 1828 Coleridge was devising a Tory Utopia in whicharistocracy, commerciality, and clerisy discharged separate but reinforcing func-tions; but his "national church" or clerisy is concerned to maintain culture ratherthan religion, and we move irrevocably out of the reigning and into the radicalmode of thought once it appears that the three agencies operate independently ofone another rather than in shared dependence on a central sovereignty. Coler-idge's On the Constitution in Church and State is in many ways a counterpart toHarrington's Oceana, which he admired185 and supposed to belong to his "Pla-tonic" tradition (as possibly it does).186

A Tory radicalism — in the eighteenth century a means of maintaining Romanvirtue in a fading partnership with Christian dynasticism - could in the earlynineteenth century grow out of the fissures Burke had managed to open betweenaristocracy, commerce, and culture. It was post-Whig in the sense that it ac-cepted and sought to exploit the primacy that Whig thought since Defoe andAddison had accorded to the notions."of manners and culture, but it was alsopaternalist to the extent that it seemed to make culture dependent on gentry andclerical protection. Since a nostalgia for the Middle Ages was on the point ofdeveloping (for reasons to be examined in a moment) we seem to be finding meritat last in the theses of Thompson and Kramnick; but it is the defect of any

185 On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. and with an intro. by John Barrell (London, 1972),p. 51.

186 See Pocock , " C o n t e x t s for t h e S tudy of J a m e s H a r r i n g t o n , " // Pensiero Politico X I , 1 ( 1 9 7 8 ) , p p .20-35.


"paternalist" interpretation of Tory opposition that paternalism could be (andwas) outbid by patronage any day of any week in the long years of Whig suprem-acy. Radical Toryism derived its republican content from the fact that it was anattempt to make clients act independently of their patrons, which was why read-ers of Cicero so easily saw it as Catilinarian. In ecclesiastical matters, silent thoughthese may have been from Atterbury to Newman, its churchmanship could be sohigh as to make the church independent of the establishment, while in the rela-tions between classes the idea of a Tory democracy could at times go to surprisinglengths. J. B. Bernard, an unusually deviant Fellow of King's, was in the 1830sclose to calling for a workers' revolution in support of the landed interest.187

We are on the wilder shores here, but their sands stretch far away. The prob-lem of pauperism imposed itself on the English consciousness during the 1790s,and Malthus's Essay on the Principles of Population is a result. This may be charac-terized as a piece of pessimistic Whiggism, part of that "stem paideia" that max-imized the prices to be paid for civil order the better to emphasize that the priceswould have to be paid. William Cobbett saw Malthus's Essay in that light, to-gether with the whole developing science of political economy, and like othershe tried to imagine a rural society in which the cost in suffering and humiliationwould be less high. Since it was a commonplace that the Whig aristocracy andthe landowning class generally - whom he detested not as Norman conquerorsbut as paper-money upstarts — had risen to power on the dissolution of the mon-asteries, it was possible to imagine a time when the protectors of learning hadalso been the protectors of the needy. Cobbett did not join the neomedievalistgentry in nostalgia for a hearty and hospitable baronage whose doors had stoodopen to the poor (he knew too much about rural life for that), but he did persuadehimself that charity to the unfortunate had been better managed by the monksthan by the poor-law overseers. He enlarged this issue until it became his key tothe understanding of history. His History of the Protestant Reformation in Englandand Ireland (1824) was a total indictment of English Protestantism (dissent noless than establishment), not merely for the destruction of medieval charity, butfor the erection of capitalist agriculture, political oligarchy, corruption, borough-mongering, paper money, standing armies, and The Thing in all its aspects, withthe Puritan, American, and French revolutions thrown in as "Reformations Two,Three, and Four." There is much more here than autodidact egocentricity; Cob-bett appears as the first Englishman to reject, by wholesale and with his eyesopen, the three hundred years of history in which England had taken its modernshape. To do this, we may wish to assert, he needed a fully revolutionary con-

187 James B. Bernard, Theory of the Constitution Compared with its Practice in Ancient and Modern Times(London, 1834). See Gregory Claes, "A Utopian Tory Revolutionary at Cambridge: The PoliticalIdeas and Schemes of James Bernard, 1834-1839," Historical Journal XXV, 3 (1982), pp. 583-604.


sciousness, and Marxism, with great plausibility, would have him find it in aproletarian class-consciousness that should recognize capitalism as the agencytransforming the world and the proletariat as the victim, inheritor, and resolu-tion of that transformation. But if there was a class present in Cobbett's thinking,it consisted not of proletarians but of cottagers, and the most revolutionary actthey were likely to perform was to go to America and not come back (Cobbetthimself returned to England twice). The cottager was not likely to see himself asinhabiting a world transformed by the cash nexus or as empowered by history tocarry on the process of creating it; he would prefer to inveigh against the capital-ization of agriculture and the corruption of the unspecialized labor he had onceperformed. The language of country opposition was suited to his purposes, andsince he already possessed a politicized but not precisely a class consciousness, hefound it far more natural to denounce his betters for corrupting the realm thanfor exploiting his labor; his ideology was wide-ranging and unspecialized, and itis entertaining to imagine Cobbett's observations on the phrase "the idiocy ofrural life."

It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging insome degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarilyentailed some degree of neomedievalism. There was a neomedievalism amongromantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protec-tors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgeanupholders of a code of chivalric manners.188 But this is perhaps of less significancethan the opportunity that thinking like Cobbett's supplied to the clerics, aca-demics, and gentlemen who were taking up the role of the clerisy and beginningwith the Arnolds to represent culture as the governing class's title to govern.Their thinking could be Tory and even Anglo-Catholic, but it could also be asviolently radical as Cobbett's own, and given that a war between classes wasalways quite as likely in the countryside as in the factory towns, a Tory radicalismremained as lively a possibility in the nineteenth century as it had ever been inthe eighteenth and inherited some of its language from the former age. Eventoday, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as eitherprogressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son ofliberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead ofpraising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community andmoral economy. The difference has something to do with the distribution ofemphasis between rural and urban history, more with the view the individualtakes of the historic significance of the specialization of labor.

188Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, Conn.,1981).


V. From Cobbett's History of the Reformation toMacaulay's History of England

Where there are Tories there should also be Whigs, but the accidents of nomen-clature during the counterrevolutionary wars left the term "Tory" denoting aninflexible defender of the Revolution-Hanoverian Whig regime, and the term"Whig" denoting an aristocratic frondeur and member of an antiwar rump, whichhad survived from the earlier opposition to George III and become a magnetattracting a miscellany of ideologies. It was of this "Whig party" that Byronwrote:

Where are the Grenvilles? Turn'd, as usual. WhereMy friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were.. . . Nought's permanent among the human raceExcept the Whigs not getting into place.189

But it has to be reiterated that Grenvilles were Whigs and had never beenanything else. We have to distinguish between the "Whig party" (Burke's "NewWhigs") and the century-old Whig regime that Burke's "Old Whigs" (survivorsof the Old Corps becoming known as "Tories") defended against its enemies.What of "Old Whig" thought in the very different sense made known to us byCaroline Robbins? Insofar as there was a continuous rhetoric demanding reformof the franchise and the electoral system - the "Whig party" tended to avoidusing it - this contained elements as old as the First Whigs if not the NewModel Army: Old Whig in the Commonwealth sense. Insofar as the Whig partyand other radical groups kept up the attack on the king's ministers, in Parliamentand at war, as exponents of Old Corruption, it employed a language as old asRobert Harley and Charles Davenant: both Commonwealth Whig and countryTory. By 1832, however, the wars were over and the finances stabilized, Cobbettwas on his gridiron, and something like a "Walpolean moment" had recurred.But instead of reimposing an oligarchic governo stretto, a recombination of Whig-gisms, capable of governing and claiming to speak for the mainstream Whigtradition, reversed the policy symbolized by the Septennial Act and carried acautious but at the same time far-reaching measure of parliamentary reform. Thiswas bitterly opposed by "Tories" who saw themselves as the heirs of Pitt andBurke, but the greatest of its intellectual apologists presented reform as a Bur-kean measure. Macaulay declared that because England had enjoyed a "preserving

189 Don Juan, canto XI, stanzas 79, 82.


revolution" in 1688, Britain had escaped a "destroying revolution" in 1848,19°and it has recently been pointed out how little sympathy he displayed for eitherthe country or the Commonwealth criticisms of what was established in 1688and after.191 A revision of ideologies accompanied the formation of ReformWhiggism and the "Whig interpretation of history," and this long essay has beenconcerned with how we must see history now that this interpretation has beentaken apart. It may therefore conclude with a study of how it was put together.

Given that reform was accomplished within the parameters of regime history,we need to ask what role in preparing it was played by the various radicals whoduring the Napoleonic wars were active in and around the city of Westminster:Burdett, Hobhouse, Cartwright, Cobbett, Hunt, and Place. All of these heartilymistrusted the Whig party as engaged in the aristocratic game of politics itpretended to oppose, and all remembered with pleasure their victory over theaging Sheridan. But it is always difficult to decide when reform ceases to beradical and becomes accommodation, and though they found it easy to denouncethe aristocracy in politics as a monolith of Old Corruption, the Westminsterradicals could see within their own ranks evidence that gentlemen politicianscould demand reform and denounce corruption without ceasing to be what theywere; governo largo is an aristocratic strategy as well as governo stretto. This studyhas insisted that the roots of radicalism reached far back in history, and it is withsatisfaction that one learns that Burdett was recognized as at heart a Queen AnneTory and used to meet with Byron, Hobhouse, Kinnaird, and Sir Robert Wilsonin a Westminster dining club called The Rota.192 Harringtonian echoes, whilethey still resounded, placed these radicals not very far left of the heirs of Fox inthe Whig party. One is tempted, of course, to say that this was the end of theneo-Harringtonian road; the latest historian of the Philosophic Radicals thinksthat the echoes of agrarian radicalism died out during the 1820s and that thefuture in Westminster belonged to the Benthamite contributions to the West-minster Review.193 These beyond doubt had not a neo-Harringtonian cell in theirbodies, and though they became radical democrats in order to do battle with OldCorruption, it was because Mill had convinced Bentham (or Mill and Benthamthemselves) that the aristocratic regime would never enact philosophic legisla-tion. But we have to be careful in evaluating their role. Burdett and Hobhouseended their days as conservatives, which will furnish some with more evidence ofthe nostalgic and paternalist character of Harringtonian social criticism; yet theattack on aristocratic corruption remained powerful in working-class rhetoric,

190Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James II, ed. C. H. Firth (London, 1913).191 J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981).192J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London: 1796-1821 (Oxford, 1982), p . 281.

See the following note.193 William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841 (Oxford,

1979), pp. 47-57, 62 (the Rota Club), 95-6.


and the names of Coleridge and Cobbett ought to remind us that agrarian valuesremained valid in stating a radical (and in Cobbett's case an authentically popu-list) criticism of a commercial society that certainly included the ideology ofPhilosophic Radicalism. Perhaps we should emphasize less the proposition (whichis certainly true) that some kinds of radicalism became Tory, and more the prop-osition (which has been neglected) that some kinds of Toryism remained radical.The hypothesis that at some point in time a liberalism that was nothing butbourgeois must be confronted by a socialism that could only be proletarian isdifficult to elaborate without blotting out the rural scene.

It may very well be, however, that such a figure as Cobbett was more effectiveas a critic of the changing social relations of his age than as a source of thearguments by which parliamentary reform was in fact justified; the Reform of1832 was not carried by men he admired, nor was it intended to remedy the illsof which he complained, and there are many contemporary radicals of whom thesame could be said. It was achieved by parliamentary aristocrats who believed ina deferential society; what was changing rapidly was the understanding of defer-ence itself and of the social, moral, and political framework within which itoperated.194 The ideology of reform was an ideology of modernization, a conceptlong effective in the vocabulary of the Whig order. This is not the place in whichto review the long and complex debate that preceded the Reform Act, but anattempt will be made to place it in the context of the history of Whiggism duringthe preceding century — a context of which the debaters themselves were acutelyaware. We return, then, to the Revolution of 1688 as the point from whichregime and radical Whiggism divided, or rather to the seminal debate concerningthe relation between 1688 and 1789-

After Paine's The Rights of Man, the most significant of the various replies toBurke's Reflections is probably Sir James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae, less be-cause of its argumentative content than of the strategic place it occupies in theargument. Mackintosh complained that Burke's appeal to precedent and prescrip-tion was so absolute and constricting that it shut out all understanding of whatthe French had been doing or why a revolution had occurred; it was a scientificnecessity, he said, to have some means of understanding these phenomena, whichBurke had left to seem a mere mystery of iniquity.195 The fact that Mackintoshwas not able to avoid the double-standard argument, the fact that a few yearslater he performed what looks like an intellectual capitulation and submission toBurke, should not obscure the further fact that we are listening here to a repre-sentative of Scottish scientific Whiggism.196 Deeply though Burke was allied to194 D . C . M o o r e , The Politics of Deference: A Study in the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System

(New York, 1976).195 Vindiciae Gallicae, sec. V I .196 Lionel A. McKenzie, "The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform; James Mack-

intosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae,11 Eighteenth-Century Studies XIV, 3 (1981), pp. 264-82.


the great Scottish theorists, his appeal to prescription has such roots in Englishcommon-law thinking that it was out of place in Scotland; before Sir WalterScott could achieve a Scottish equivalent to Burke's conservatism he had to achievea new imaginative vision of the history of Scotland. Yet it has been argued earlierhere that the authority of Burke's argument was such that for a time it virtuallydrove out and replaced the progressive modernisms of the Scottish Enlightenmentas a means of authorizing the Whig order; we have to look closely before we cansee in how many ways Burke was in fact an ally of the Scottish school.

Burke's was not a mode of thinking that Mackintosh could adopt, even whenhe was obliged to endorse it; Gibbon, on the other hand, slipped into a Burkeanmode almost as soon as Burke himself. The fierceness of intellectual reaction andrepression in Scotland, however, was even greater than in England and forcedScotsmen who might otherwise have thought like Burke's "New Whigs" to choosebetween submission, emigration, and a risky independence. Mackintosh for someyears chose submission, and Dugald Stewart's career was a series of retreats fromthe subversive attitudes of Hume to a sepulcher exalted above his on the CaltonHill. John Millar, on the other hand, a still-youthful representative of the greatgeneration of the 1770s, was shielded by the patronage of opposition Whig no-bility in both kingdoms, and his Historical View of the English Government, whichbegan appearing in 1787, is dedicated to Charles James Fox, without whose namecoming to mind (says Millar) it is impossible to think about the principles of theconstitution for very long.197 This is not enough to make the Historical View aradical work, but it does give its author a significant place in the process bywhich the Whig mind recovered from the French Revolution and from Burke'sassaults on it.

Scottish scientific Whiggism — of which Millar's Origin of Ranks is an outstand-ing representative — had employed the notion of a progress of society, from sav-agery to commerce, as a means of vindicating the Whig order and presentingcommercial and specialized society as superior to the classical republics and theirancient virtue. The Historical View does not retreat from this position or equatecorruption with the loss of classical virtue, but it does emphasize (as Millar wasentitled to stress) that corruption is the danger to which government and libertyin commercial societies are peculiarly exposed; this notion is combined with anapparent fear that the privatization of the socially specialized personality mayhave gone further in England than in still underdeveloped Scotland and may havebegun to produce those deleterious effects that had troubled Adam Smith.198

Millar further made it clear, as Hume would certainly not have done, that theEnglish constitution contained certain principles, built into it at an earlier time,

197 Millar, An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to theRevolution in 1688, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1818), vol. I, sig. A2.

198Historical View, vol. Ill, pp. 86-94; IV, 151-3, 198-9.


designed to protect political liberty against the effects of corruption and that itwas the business of statesmen at all times to see that these principles were pre-served. We encounter here the question of Millar's attitude toward the Englishancient constitution, which the modernism inherent in Scottish scientific historyhad hitherto tended to overthrow. As an original theorist of European feudalism,Millar could not deny that English history had passed through a feudal phase,and he made it quite clear that this was incompatible with many of the suppos-edly immemorial liberties (including the representation of the Commons in Par-liament) on which the doctrine of an ancient constitution had rested. But by avariety of moves - of which the hypothesis of a prefeudal phase of allodial prop-erty was one199 — Millar was able to present the key events in the history ofmedieval institutions as sometimes the recovery of former liberties and sometimesthe consolidation of new ones. He vested these tactics with such continuity thatby the time he reached the Stuart reigns in England he was able to maintain thatthere now existed an ancient constitution - a set of rules based on reverence forantiquity and long in the formation - that the kings were seeking to trans-gress.200 His account of Charles I is as sternly Whiggish as Hume's had beenskeptical of Whiggism, and it would not be unduly difficult for his readers toequate post-1688 attempts to disturb the principles of the constitution by cor-ruption with post-1603 attempts to disturb them by prerogative. What theseprinciples were must be discovered by historical interpretation rather than inlegal precedent, but Millar was a scientific Whig and was prepared to constructsuch interpretations. Addressing himself to Fox, therefore, he supplied a "Whiginterpretation of history" that Hume would have denied and the later Burkewould not have constructed.

Burke once remarked that even if the constitution were not as ancient as En-glishmen had believed, they had always acted on the belief that it was.201 Millar'sreading of history is more sociologically sophisticated than Burke's and less un-compromisingly presumptive, but the two are not at bottom very far apart. Menin history act as the situation requires, and in historically changing situationsthey act in changing ways; but to act pragmatically is to act in the consciousnessof precedent, and if historical change is continuous, precedents from former sit-uations can be applied to the needs of new ones. Innovative reform may in thesecircumstances be an essentially conservative activity. The belief is as old as Seldenand Hale, but it was Millar's task to write a circumstantial history of how oldactions could become new ones and could be used to justify them. If this couldbe done, it could be shown how even a revolution might be an act of conserva-tion. By the time he wrote, English and Scottish historians were agreed that this

199Historical View, vol. I, pp. 131-4, 171, 185, 200-3, 290-301.200Historical View, vol. Ill, pp. 156-7, 189-92, 220-7.201Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 205 -8 .


could be done for the English Revolution of 1688 but not for the French Revo-lution of 1789, and Mackintosh had made, but subsequently withdrawn, thecharge against Burke that on his principles it could not be done at all. It seemedto be the position of Burke and his disciples that 1688 was not repeatable andcontained no guide to subsequent practice, and this was becoming a ground forholding that the constitution established after 1688 could not be reformed excepton principles as dangerous as those the French had followed. If this position weremaintained, there would indeed be something in Burke's rejection of theory pro-foundly constrictive of practice; and Scottish Whiggism respected practice andwished to advance it.

Lord Dacre has proposed ranking Millar, Mackintosh, and Macaulay as asuccession of historians through whom Whigs of the Holland House circle ef-fected a reconstruction of the Whig view of politics and history.202 Details of thiscontinuous activity, if such it was, remain to be worked out. Millar lived out hislife in Glasgow, but it was as a Holland House habitue that Mackintosh formedthe extensive documentary collection on which Macaulay drew so heavily for hisunderstanding of the seventeenth century, while the Anglo-Saxon and Norman-Angevin periods — the other great focus of Whig historiography since its begin-nings — received the attention of Francis Palgrave and of Macaulay's colleagueon the Edinburgh Review, John Allen.203 There is reason to speak of a "HollandHouse" school of historians, who under the patronage of the heirs of Fox engagedin a reconciliation of old and new Whiggisms, blending the spirit of Scottishscientific history with the headier brew of Burke, an enterprise that could becarried on only by reaffirming the mainstream Whig belief in the continuity ofEnglish institutions.

In medieval studies, these writers preserved the essence of the ancient consti-tution through a variety of restatements of the theme of primeval Germanic lib-erty. From Palgrave and Allen we are taught to look to Kemble and the receptioninto England of the notion of the mark community,204 which linked the anthro-pological scholarship of the nineteenth century with the allodial assemblies of theeighteenth and the Tacitean folkgatherings of the seventeenth-century antiquar-ians. However scrupulously the newer Whigs might stress the primitive andagnatic character of early German institutions and the depth and abruptness of

202 Lord Macaulay, The History of England, ed. and abridged wi th an int ro . by H u g h Trevor-Roper(Harmondswor th , 1979), p p . 12—13. For Scottish responses to both the French Revolution andBurke 's Reflections, see Stefan Coll ini , Donald W i n c h , and J o h n Burrow, That Noble Science ofPolitics: A Study in Nineteenth-century Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1983), especially chaps. I, III,and VI .

203 P . B . M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in WhigHistoriography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The H a g u e , 1978), p p . 7 2 -110.

2 0 4 H e r e and in what follows I am deeply indebted to J . W . Burrow, A Liberal Descent.


the feudalizations they had subsequently undergone, any medieval experimentwith counsel, assembly, and representation must take on an appearance of a re-turn to old norms: a recovery of the old and its adaptation to the new. And sinceany departure from a supposed feudal pattern must look like an enlargement ofthe consultative community beyond the immediate circle of tenants in chief, itcould be viewed as part of a transition from closed feudal to open freeholding andcommercial society: a liberalization to which the revival of prefeudal and eventribal norms had paradoxically contributed. The equation of old with new cer-tainly did not originate with these historians, but if we may think of them asengaged in a reconciliation of scientific Whiggism with Burke, the importanceof that move in this context becomes evident.

Burke had presented the Whig order as a modern commercial society, of thekind celebrated by the Scottish historians, but one that rested on and would notrepudiate its medieval, even its chivalric and clerical, foundations. He had pre-sented these foundations as cultural rather than institutional; manners had inter-ested him more than laws. It was not a long step from manners to customs,however, and the ancient constitution had been a cluster of behavior patterns,mentalities, and institutions bound up with perceiving political action as cus-tomary and prescriptive. The question was whether the appeal to precedents, andthe adherence to a prescriptive manner of political behavior, could be presentedas carried over from one stage of social development to another; if it could, thegap between manners and customs might be bridged, and the habit of basingpolitical action on the authority of former usages would appear valid throughoutthe process of modernization of which the Scots had written. It is this that lendspeculiar importance to the studies of the crisis of the seventeenth century con-ducted by Hallam and Macaulay. The latter in particular employed an analysis asold as that used by Fletcher and Defoe in 1698. The feudal or Gothic mode ofasserting the public liberty in arms endured well enough, rough and violent as itwas, so long as the military strength of the kingdom consisted of vassals andretainers following their lords; once it came to consist of mercenary or profes-sional standing armies paid out of the public purse, the cause of liberty mustdepend on whether that purse was to be dispensed and replenished by the kingalone or by the representatives of the kingdom giving their consent to the king'sactions.205 Perceiving this crisis before them, the parliaments of Charles I re-sponded not by asserting that new times required that they be vested with newpowers, but by reviving and revising such precedents as they could find fromfeudal times and affirming their validity under postfeudal circumstances. Whetherthey did so anachronistically or in a conscious updating and translation hardlymattered; the important consideration was that it was they who were actingprescriptively and the king who was either innovating or falsifying the past b>205 Macaulay, The History of England, vol. I, chap. 1, pp. 27 -37 .


reading his new need of prerogative into the actions of his feudal predecessors.The Commons had placed themselves in the mainstream of postfeudal history,and left the king no option but to act in ill faith - an option that Charles I, inMacaulay's view, had all too readily embraced.206 It was a neat reversal of Hume'sperception that in a time of historical change the constitutional rules by whichking or Parliament should act had been underformulated.

When Macaulay arrives at the crisis of 1688 and the reign of William III,there is a sense in which his long-term strategy seems a little less clear. Thisstatement may seem paradoxical. The years from 1688 to 1702 form both thesubstance of his History as we have it and the hinge on which his understandingof English history turns. In his interpretation of the Revolution Settlement heshows himself more Burkean than Burke himself; like him Macaulay never men-tions Locke as theorist of the event,207 but emphasizes the prudential and pre-scriptive character of the acts then taken almost to the exclusion of Burke's near-Tory insistence that they were acts of necessity whose repetition was not to becontemplated. Macaulay's revolution, one feels, could have been played again ifsome duke of Cumberland had made it unavoidable,208 but it is of far greaterimportance to him to confront the issue of reform and explain that a preservingrevolution in the seventeenth century has rendered unnecessary a destroying rev-olution in the nineteenth. However, if Macaulay were to repeat for 1688 thepattern of interpretation he had established for 1641, this would have been themoment to make clear what changes in the structure of society had occurred tocall for the updating of ancient precedents; yet, though social-change explana-tions of political crises had become profoundly Whig, 1688 has never looked likethe product of a social transformation in the way that 1641 has — partly becausethe lower orders were kept in the role of confused noise off.209 Crisis in this sensefollowed a few years later, when the demands of William Ill's wars produced themilitary, financial, political, and commercial structure to which CommonwealthWhigs and country Tories set themselves in opposition. Macaulay, whose heroeswere William III and the conquerors of India, knew well enough that this cleav-

206Macaulay, "Hallam's Constitutional History," in Critical and Historical Essays, vol. I, pp. 316—22, 3 4 1 -5 .

207Macaulay considers Locke as exculpated from complicity in Monmouth's rebellion (Firth, ed.,History of England, vol. II, chap. V, pp. 538—9n.), as author of the Letters on Toleration (vol. IIchap. VI, p . 670), as dedicator of the Essay on Human Understanding (vol. IV, chap. XV, p. 1,806),and as active in the nonrenewal of the Licensing Act (vol. V, chap. XXI, p. 2,482) and therecoinage of 1695 (ibid., p. 2,571).

208The unacceptability of the last of George Ill's sons is a half-buried theme of the history of thisperiod. See Macaulay's memorandum on the assassination attempt against Victoria in 1840 in G.M. Young, sel. and ed., Macaulay: Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 799-804:"The King of Hanover cannot be implicated, one would think."

209See the ballad The Orange reprinted in Goldie, "The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure ofPolitical Argument."


age among Whigs and Tories alike had occurred, and we are not in any ultimatedoubt where he stood in regard to it. As J. W. Burrow has pointed out, Macaulayhad no sympathy whatever for the neo-Harringtonian critics of oligarchy andcorruption.210 If Somers is his paragon among the Revolution and Junto Whigs,Treasurer Montagu ranks close behind; his labors in setting up the Bank of En-gland are celebrated, the need for a new credit structure is explained, and Macau-lay remarks on the paradox that of all the great English social thinkers only Burke- he does not mention Tucker; few people did - has grasped the function of thenational debt and refrained from saying that it will ruin the nation.211 There ishardly a grain of the Old Whig in Macaulay's composition, and this is importantto our understanding of his arguments for parliamentary reform.

What we lack is Macaulay's completed interpretation of the eighteenth cen-tury, which he intended to bring to the death of George III but did not live tocarry past that of William. We must reconstruct, or conjecture, what it wouldhave been from his essays in the Edinburgh Review, but it is this that gives hisaccount of the foundations of Whig rule an air of incompleteness. It can be seenthat he approved of the Tory opposition to "no peace without Spain"212 — perhapsbecause his hatred of Marlborough survived the latter's victories, perhaps as anecho of Holland House disapproval of the war in the Peninsula — and might havedone justice to Harley if execution (we may be sure) upon Bolingbroke. For hisjudgment of Walpole we must rely upon two rather slight essays on HoraceWalpole and the earlier career of the elder Pitt,213 and we are without his sus-tained interpretation of the Septennial Act and the years between 1714 and 1760.We should like to know how far he would have presented Old Corps rule as aregime of oligarchy, patronage, and restriction, or conceded that the Whig re-forms of his time were aimed at Whig foundations laid a century earlier. Weshould like to know his sustained interpretation of the first half of George Ill'sreign, and whether he would have kept up his early contention that the ministriesof Bute (North? Pitt?) were "Tory" and the oppositions of Rockingham (Fox?Grey?) the true heirs of Hampden, Russell, and Somers; for this would have beencrucial to his two-party reading of English history, with the Whigs perpetuallythe party of progress and the Tories that of resistance. We should like to have hisstudy of Pitt, Fox, and Burke in the early years of the revolutionary wars, becausewithout it we do not know how he would have gone about reconciling the sun-dered fragments of the Whig tradition or how he would have presented the earlyhistory of parliamentary reform, and related this theme to those of European,

210Burrow, A Liberal Descent, pp. 55-60.21 Macaulay, History of England, vol. V, chap. XIX, p. 2,284.212Macaulay, "Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in Spain," Critical and Historical Essays, vol. II,

pp. 181-6.213Ibid., pp. 207-24 (for the Septennial Act, see pp. 221-2), 237-9.


imperial, and conservative power, made necessary in English history by the sec-ond phase of oligarchic rule. All we are left with is the impression the essaysconvey, namely, that Whig oligarchy was a necessary holding action, pendingthe rise of the middle class.

The point is not that we know less than we might about Macaulay's historicalintellect, but that the authority — in many ways so great as to remain dominant— of the "Whig interpretation of history" is in fact deficient to the extent thatwe do not have a history of the greatest of Whig centuries by the greatest ofWhig historians. Hume stopped in 1688, and Smollett was a lesser if moreradical continuator. Macaulay did not go beyond 1702, and the Trevelyans andHammonds took a sterner view of George III and a more irenic view of the rivalrybetween Pitt and Fox than Macaulay might have done. The Whig view of thisreign was a secondary construction, which blurred the answer to the questionWhigs were in fact confronting. In consequence the Whig interpretation hasbeen found vulnerable at its weakest point, which lies on either side of the year1760, and has been replaced by an altogether different style of historiography,which seeks to escape from eighteenth-century rhetoric and its categories. Howfar this escape has been effected might be the subject of debate; the view thatthere is nothing to government but high politics is profoundly oligarchic, andWhig discourse can now be seen as a conversation about oligarchy. Against theemergence of this paradigm Butterfield struggled, in some ways in vain; but ifthere had really been an authoritative Whig interpretation of the reign of GeorgeIII the history of historiography would have been different.

By the time of Macaulay's History, however, Whig historiography had a long lifebefore it. P. B. M. Blaas does not see it undergoing significant modification untilthe last years of the century; ideologically speaking, it is tempting to connectthis, somehow, with the watershed of 1886.214 In the meantime, there was onemajor respect in which Macaulay may be said to have perfected the Whig inter-pretation: He made it possible to see common-law and Burkean adherence toprecedent as compatible with, indeed as an instrument of, Scottish and scientific-Whig progress and modernization. His view of political action was Burkean tothe point of conservatism; his view of social progress was commercial to the pointof philistinism, and in his minute on Indian education he endorsed the radicalutilitarianism of James Mill, which he had condemned as an approach to Englishpolitics.215 The idea that a ruling class was charged with and legitimated by the

214John Roach, "Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia," Cambridge Historical Journal XIII, 1(1957), pp. 37-57 . For Blaas, see n. 203.

215 Macaulay, "Mill's Essay on Government," "The Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill," bothin Critical and Historical Essays.


maintenance of culture was about to pass from the hands of the heirs of Addisoninto those of the heirs of Coleridge. But with these paradoxes and the extent towhich they could be reconciled in mind, we can now solve (it is hoped finally)what may be termed das Herbert Butterfieldproblem: that of seeing how the compla-cent progesssivism criticized in The Whig Interpretation of History could coexistwith the complacent antiquarianism admired in The Englishman and His History.The Whig historians had at last discovered how to have it both ways, and fromthis time on the enduring offense of Hume was his love of making the smoothplaces rough: of insisting on the knots and fractures in what they desired to seeas the straight grain of the English oak.216

On the other hand, as we have seen, Macaulay left the Whig interpretationweak, in the sense that he did not synthesize the history of the eighteenth centuryas that of the conflict between the Whig order and its critics, many of whom inAmerica and England were or claimed to be more Whiggish than the Whigs.We can see that Macaulay could and would have written such a history, and wesuspect that it would have been strongly supportive of the ruling order and scorn-ful of a quasi-republican criticism, which, whether in Commonwealth or countryshape, he visibly disliked. What - we ask yet again - would have been hishistory of the American Revolution? Yet his ideas were formed in some measureby Holland House and the Edinburgh Review, by circles critical of, if not hostileto, the oligarchy in its Pittite form and to its conduct of the wars, and we haveto ask (we cannot answer) how far he would have been able to detach himselffrom the language still traditional with oppositions. His historical intellect tookfurther shape during the debates prior to 1832, when he was advocating in termsreminiscent of Burke a reform of a parliamentary structure essentially Whig,which the heirs of Pitt bitterly opposed and the heirs of Fox had left in the handsof the Westminster radicals. It was one thing to pour the ashes of Burke into theurn of Fox, to marry the historiographical style of Burke with that of Millar; in1832 Macaulay was faced with the ghost of Burke and a living memory (Grey) ofthe Society of the Friends of the People. It was an accident, but it was not anaccident without meaning, that Macaulay did not write the history of a reformprogram that had until recently been conducted by Commonwealth Whigs andTory radicals. Unlike Hume, who had deliberately stopped short of the contestsover the character of the Whig regime, Macaulay did not live to write its history;he would not have abstained from doing so. But the fact that his part of hishistory remained unwritten lent strength to two of the ideological maneuverswith which he was most involved. One is the conflation, under the name of"Tories," of the defenders of the unreformed Whig structure, the King's Friendsin the early years of George III, the nostalgic and quasi-Jacobite squires of Wil-liam Ill's reign, the more corrupt and sinister figures of Restoration politics, and

216This is the object of allusion in Duncan Forbes's "terrible campaign country."


— still more remotely perceived in the historical pageant — the churchmen, cav-aliers, and agents of the prerogative under the early Stuarts. It is hard to believethat this would have been unmodified by a detailed narrative of Georgian politics.Macaulay knew that Tories had used radical and republican language, and hewould have had to come to grips with the implications. We may regret that hedid not.

The second maneuver was the advocacy of reform in the terms that Macaulayand others had employed in the debates preceding 1832. These too remainedunmodified by the History of England as published, but we may doubt if theycould have been unaffected had it been carried to completion. They furnish aninteresting blend of arguments emerging from the history of Whig discourse. Ithad always been recognized that there was a formidable number of socially activeand conscious persons not represented in Parliament, and discourse had beenfaced with the problems of finding terms in which they could be categorized andarguments in which it could be debated whether they should be represented ornot. It was recognized that the social structure was too complex and the represen-tative structure too random to leave it possible for long to dismiss these personsmerely as "the mob," and the more it was granted that many of them were"respectable," the more it became necessary to determine in what their respecta-bility consisted and in what ways if any it entitled them to be represented. Inquasi-republican language it was contended that the existing regime was corruptbecause too many of the persons it represented were in various ways dependentand that the admission to the franchise of large numbers of persons presumedindependent would render it more virtuous. In more Lockean language it wascontended that because these persons were moral individuals, or because theywere in various ways proprietors, they possessed a right to be represented thatought not to be denied them. There ensued from both arguments a debate regard-ing what constituted independence and property, and what constituted these thingsthe prerequisites of either virtue or right; by some it was argued that the posses-sion of a moral personality, and by others that the possession of a capacity tolabor, was enough to make the possessor at least potentially an independent moraland political being. We have seen, however, how Tucker argued that this was tomisstate the case, because the individual needed a deeper involvement in com-mercial relations before rights could be generated; we have also seen how Burkefollowed the same strategy as Ireton at Putney, in attacking the abstract groundsof a claim to representation rather than the expediency of granting the claim.

Well before 1832, the practice had developed of referring to the unrepresentedbut active sector of the population as "public opinion," not because the repre-sented lacked opinions ("the electors of Liskeard," remarked Gibbon, "are com-monly of the same opinion as Mr. Elliott")217 but because the unrepresented had

217 Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (New York, 1966), p. 162.


nothing else by which to make their presence felt. The term "opinion" was ofconsiderable antiquity in Whig political thinking. In Hume's hands it had of-fered the reassurances of a conservative skeptic, who considered that opinionswere on the whole subject to the disciplines of social experience; but if we lookback as far as Sir William Temple, writing in 1672, we find it laid down thatthe authority of rulers can rest upon nothing but opinion, because power (hislanguage has overtones of both Hobbes and Harrington) is invariably in the handsof the ruled.218 Some of Temple's implications are not reassuring. The state pos-sesses no monopoly of the means of coercion, and opinion emancipated from itsdiscipline can prove wild and ungovernable. The specter of enthusiasm startsfrom the page, and we recall how Burke attributed the French Revolution to thegrowth of "middle classes," no longer deferential to their superiors, among whomthere was nothing to "resist an opinion in its course" and human energy couldbreak free from all the disciplines of property.

The reformers of 1832 declared that there now existed a "public opinion" anda "middle class" or classes, which required only to be represented in Parliamentand did not need that representation mediated through the controls exerted byaristocratic patronage or influence. The antireformers replied that to emancipateparliamentary representation from the discipline, stern or gentle, exercised bythe natural superiors of society would be to liberate human energy in just thesame way as had happened in France and would infallibly lead to the same results.Some of them seem to have been very much in earnest. To this some reformersresponded by drawing a distinction between patronage and deference, arguingthat the latter was given freely to natural superiors and need not be controlled orinfluenced by the former; this opens up the larger question of just where theysituated the "public opinion" it was proposed to enfranchise, and how far the1832 Reform Act was an experiment in the institutionalization of deference. Aconsiderable literature now exists on this subject, but it may be remarked thatany aristocratic polity experimenting with a governo largo must do so in somedegree of expectation that deference will continue to operate. Others again carriedthe argument in a direction recalling Madison, contending that representationitself ensured the presence of a natural aristocracy, or alternatively that it ren-dered one unnecessary.219

The reformers did not share — though the antireformers in some cases did -Burke's fear that the rule of the middle classes would subject all property tonothing but the mind of desperate men. It is proper to observe that, since theywere not proposing to enfranchise numbers of workmen, they had every reasonto suppose that those they were enfranchising would be distinguished preciselyby the possession of property; but this does not cover every aspect of the case.Burke had imagined the revolutionary middle class less as entrepreneurs and218Sir William Temple, "Of Government," Works, 3 vols (London, 1770), vol. I, p. 34.219See Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords, chap. VI.


speculators than as restless and power-hungry men of talent, who wanted to servean expanding state and seized the state in order to expand it: a Machiavellian andSorelian vision. There was enough substance left in eighteenth-century notionsof le doux commerce22® to make the idea of a middle class engaged primarily incommerce and industry reassuring by comparison, and we can imagine how easilyit could be argued that such men would readily defer to their natural superiors ifthe relationships linking them were not corrupt. The classes enfranchised in 1832were by no means all of this sort; provincial rentiers and professionals (the so-called pseudogentry) were conspicuous among them, and the debates reflect theirpresence. Nevertheless there is an ideologue of the period - W. M. Mackinnon-who specifically equates "the history of civilisation" itself with the advent ofgovernment by "public opinion," and the latter with a "middle class" whose"personal property" enables it to command the labor of others.221 It is, of course,the formula for a Marxist bourgeoisie, except that Mackinnon considers this ahistorically determinant but not a revolutionary class. Where Marx's bourgeoisiecaptures and conquers the state, Mackinnon's is admitted to the councils of thestate by the reforming Whig aristocracy, this bourgeoisie's natural superiors andhistoric allies. Civilization may be governed by opinion, but governments rulewith its consent; it is not incapable of a Bagehotian deference.

Macaulay and Mackinnon lived toward the end of the age of oligarchy, wit-nessing the reform and partial disestablishment of a system of parliamentary re-striction and control set up by a governing aristocracy between one and twocenturies earlier. Because that aristocracy was limited in size, scarcely large enoughto be called a class, it had felt obliged to rule in this way, fearing rivals andenemies within its own ranks and in urban and rural populations outside them.The coincidence of an expanding commerce, and a rapidly changing financial andmilitary technology, had enabled the aristocracy to preside over a rapid economicmodernization, with which it had successfully allied itself. An ideology of mod-ernization had served it very effectively during the age in which it had ruled byrestrictive devices, though some of these were ancient and others modern, andcontinued to serve it during the period in which it was desirable to dismantlethese devices and seek a wider circle of allies. In contrast, the groups excludedfrom power by the oligarchic regime, who were several and diverse, found itappropriate to adopt an ideology of ancient values, those of the classical republicand its virtues; this, as is generally the case with the vocabularies of opposition,served to articulate some highly telling criticisms of the values being rendereddominant by the regime. Neither the republican discourse nor those who adoptedit can be written off as reactionary or nostalgic merely because they were opposed

220 Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, N.J . , 1976).2 2 1 W. M. Mackinnon, On the Rise, Progress and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain and Other

Parts of the World (London^ 1828); History of Civilisation, 2 vols. (London, 1846).


by an ideology of modernization, any more than they can be written up as bour-geois and progressive merely because they were opposed by an entrenched aris-tocracy; the whole point is that they were opposed by both at the same time. Therepublican discourse enabled some to engage in the pursuit of modernization,others to criticize it, and not a few to engage in it and criticize it at the sametime; America, where opposition Whiggism took off into a new theater of worldhistory, is perhaps the supreme example of this duality of mind. But the Amer-ican Revolution effectively amputated republican rhetoric of the Commonwealthmode from British political discourse. It became clear after that event, if it hadnot been clear before, that the thrust of radical criticism in British politics mustbe toward the reform, not the replacement, of a parliamentary system of govern-ment, to which an intensely complex and dynamic society was committed. Theintellectual debate was correspondingly intense. It has remained unclear to thisday how far the growth of class conflict in Britain, bitter and obsessive as it haslong been in many ways, originates and continues within, and how far outside,the parameters imposed by a parliamentary structure.

Reform in 1832 was effected by Burke's New Whigs, who had regroupedthemselves and become more like his Old Whigs; it was not effected by OldWhigs as we have learned the term from Caroline Robbins, and there is a sensein which it marks the moment of their demise. The Reform Whigs retained theoutlook of an aristocracy, but because this was not a noblesse d'ancienne extractionthere was the less need to write its history, and they were able to ignore thoseeighteenth-century presentations of history that had emphasized that its rule waslittle older than 1716 or 1688. The most telling way of undermining the Whigaristocracy's role in history was to emphasize their origins under Henry VIII, butCobbett's History of the Reformation had virtually played itself off the board. Themyth of antiquity that best served the reforming aristocracy was that of the an-cient constitution, and we have seen how a synthesis of Scottish and Burkeanelements could render this compatible with an ideology of progressive moderni-zation. Proposals for reforming the franchise in 1832 went rather better with thebelief that the Commons had first been summoned to Parliament in 1265 thanwith the belief that they had attended in pre-Conquest antiquity; in both cases,it could be said, new and useful classes were being invited to the councils of therealm. But in both cases there must already have existed a realm, governed bycounsel and capable of reforming itself within the parameters of its already exist-ing institutions, and there was no reason why that realm's history, and that of itsBurkean capacity for self-reform, should not be traced back to the folkmoots of aTeutonic dawn. The ghosts of Petyt and Brady, Bolingbroke and Hume, Cart-wright and Tucker might now lie down together under the benignly amused eyeof John Selden.

What was being suppressed, but could not altogether be silenced, was the


eighteenth-century radical historiography that averred that constitution and so-ciety had begun to be corrupted at a point in past time that could be fixed andthat reform must lie in a reaffirmation of principles (or a balance of principles)that had existed before corruption set in. This was the reform language of theCommonwealth Whigs, and there is an obvious sense in which it, and they, mustlose all reason for existence once regime Whiggism discovered a language, asmuch its own as theirs, in which to reform itself. The story Caroline Robbinsbegan to tell therefore comes to an end, as far as Britain is concerned, in 1832;the American republic has continued to lament the failure of its dream and theloss of its innocence in every generation since it was founded. But the sociologyof Commonwealth and country criticism outlasts its role in constitutional debate.The debates over reform in 1867222 as well as 1832 were debates over the natureof the property, the independence, and the self and the capacity to respect it thatmight qualify new classes for admission to the franchise; and the theme of anequilibrium or harmony between landed, monied, and laboring interests, or classes,is by no means absent from the debates. One foundation for franchised indepen-dence, of course, was the control over personal property, and the capacity toemploy labor, which permitted the formation of an informed opinion, and it isdown this line that we should look for the emergence of conflict between a classthat employs labor and a class that has labor to sell. What is to be suspected isthe Whiggishness of writing all history as if it were subsumed under this conflict.Another foundation for social and political personality, much discussed with re-lation to the clerisies and service gentries of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, has been the possession and transmission of literate culture, and it is whenwe look back from this debate to the ethos of politeness in the eighteenth centurythat we catch sight of a major historical fissure. From Addison to Smith it hadbeen taken for granted that polite culture was the child of commerce and justifiedthe Whig order, but Burke and Coleridge in one way, Blake and even Cobbettin others, had opened up serious cracks in this argument, which J. S. Mill,Carlyle, Arnold, and Morris continued to explore. It is perhaps when the clerisies— a better word than intelligentsias — both radical and Tory began to denouncethe Whig and Liberal ruling order as irremediably philistine, and seek for com-munitarian, proletarian, or authoritarian allies against a cultural "bourgeoisie,"that we may regard the Scottish Enlightenment as effectively dead.222 F. B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966).

Index

Abrams, Philip, 65Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres,

143-4Acts, Book of, 44Adair, Douglass, 140Adams, John, 73, 81, 167, 269; Letters of No-

van gl us, 266nAdams, Samuel, 82, 167Addison, Joseph, 99-100, 111, 113-14, 130,

219, 235-8, 248, 280,292, 305, 310Agitators, 226, 257Alaric, 148Albigensians, 155Alembert, Jean Le Rond d\ 212, 248Alexandria, 144, 146, 153, 155Alfonso the Wise, 10Allen, John, 300Ambrose, Saint, 153America and Americans, 1, 47, 51, 66, 71, 77,

102, 145, 160-8 pass., 174, 178, 183-8pass., 196, 217-18, 231, 240, 242n, 254,263-76, 282, 285-6,288, 294, 305,309-10; see also United States

American Revolution, 51, 66, 73-88, 101,119, 125-43 pass., 149, 158-9, 161,165, 215-17, 250, 265-76 pass., 285,293, 295, 305, 309

Amsterdam, 226Ancient Constitution, 94-7, 134-5, 158, 180,

187, 193, 216, 224-33 pass., 241, 246,251-61 pass., 276-8, 280, 299

Angevins, 251, 300Anglicanism and Anglicans, 63, 120, 158,

190, 201, 211, 219, 226, 233, 237, 240,263, 281, 292

Anglo-Irish, 73-4

Anglo-Saxon period, 143, 226, 261, 288, 300Anne, Queen, 79, 112, 139, 196, 200, 234-

5, 240, 247, 251, 285, 296Answer to the Nineteen Properties of Parliament, 66,

221, 250, 267, 269Antonines, 147, 155Appleby, Joyce O., 112, 123, 242nAquinas, 103-5Arbuthnot, John, 131Arendt, Hannah, 44, 48, 60Argyll, dukes of, 77Arius and Arians, 155Aristotle and Aristotelians, 42, 46, 103—4,

106, 171, 174Arminianism and Arminians, 63, 155, 238Armorica, 149Arnold, Matthew, 310; Culture and Anarchy,

190; Arnold, Thomas and Matthew, 294Ascham, Anthony, 55Ashcraft, Richard L., 224n, 226nAsia, 118-19, 197Athanasius, 145, 153Athens, 144-5, 195, 249Atlantic Ocean, 74, 77, 79, 81, 87, 162, 275Atterbury, Francis, 240, 293Atwood, William, 221-6 pass., 231; Jus An-

glorum ab Antiquo, 222Augustan period, 33, 66, 98-9, 219, 248-9Augustus, 146, 148, 248-9

Bacon, Francis, 50, 190, 291Bagehot, Walter, 308Bailyn, Bernard, 216, 265-7Bank of England, 76, 108, 158, 175, 197,

230, 303Bank of the United States, 272

311

312 Index

Banning, Lance, 217Barbados, 183Baron, Hans, 39Barsoom, 291Bartolus, Bartolo, 40Bastille, 282Becker, CarlL., 217nBecker, Marvin, 114Beckford, William, 178, 246, 253-4Bedford, duke of, 201Bentham, Jeremy, 50, 123, 276, 291, 296;

Fragment on Government, 102, 276—7Bercovitch, Sacvan, 52Bernard, J. B., 293Bill of Exclusion, 66Birmingham, 155Blackstone, Sir William, 276, 278, 280Blass, P. B. M., 304Blake, William, 53, 155, 276, 291, 310Bolingbroke, 79, 81, 84, 108, 129-39 pass.,

180, 196, 200, 240-55 pass., 260n, 284,292, 303, 309; Dissertation upon Parties,241; The Idea of a Patriot King, 241; Remarkson the History of England, 241

Bomston, Milord, 256Boone, Daniel, 81Borderers, 238Bossuet, J. B., 155Boston, 82, 139, 265Bourbons, 131, 250-1Bowood, 186Brady, Robert, 3, 135, 181-2, 187, 221, 224,

247, 251, 260n, 309; Boroughs, 260nBrewer, John, 257, 259Bristol, 85, 159n-6l, 166, 205Britain, 1, 8, 31-4, 51, 73-87 pass., 101,

125-6, 136-49 pass., 159-67 pass., 186,194-6, 209-10, 217, 224-41 pass., 249-50, 265-78 pass., 288-9, 309-10; see alsoEngland, Ireland, Scotland

British Museum, 257nBritons, ancient, 253Browning, Reed, 235Brutus, 148Buffon, Comte G. L. L. de, 118, 144Burdett, Sir Francis, 296Burgh, James, 257, 260-1Burke, Edmund, 24, 33, 49, 65, 80-6 pass.,

94-5, 101, 139-40, 155-71, 186-91,221-9 pass., 256-64 pass., 276-310pass.; An Appeal from the New to the OldWhigs, 185n-7, 284; A Letter to a NobleLord, 201, 205; Letters on a Regicide Peace,193-4, 205-12; Reflections on the Revolutionin France, 11, 160-9 pass., 185n-90 pass.,

193-212, 279-84 pass., 290, 297-8,300n; Speech on Conciliation with America,160-6 pass.; Thoughts on the Present Discon-tents, 82, 255-6

Burrow, J. W., 303Bute, Lord, 81-3, 137, 254, 303Butler, Bishop, 161Butterfield, Herbert, 215-16, 258, 277, 304-

5; The Englishman and His History, 215,305; The Whig Interpretation of History, 215,305

Byron, Lord, 295-6Byzantium, 143

Caesar, Julius, 146, 184Calonne, Charles Alexandre de la, 212; Etat de

la France, 212Calton Hill, 298Calvinism and Calvinists, 48, 144, 164-5,

238; see also Protestantism, Puritanism andPuritans

Cambridge University, 2, 219, 278Canterbury, Province of, 190nCanterbury, University of, 157, 190nCanterbury University College, 157Capitoline Hill, 146Caribbean, 263Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 310Carte, Thomas, 260nCartwright, John, I68n, 173n, 182, 296, 309Catholicism and Catholics, 45, 144, 155, 158,

189, 197, 240, 287, 294; see also Christian-ity

Catiline, 178, 184, 245, 263, 293Cato, 235, 273Cato the Elder, 236Cato's Letters, 240Chambers, Sir Robert, 278nCharles I, 40, 75, 233, 252, 299, 301-2Charles II, 75-6, 247, 254Chartists, 257Chateaubriand, Francois Rene de, 159Chesapeake, 263Chesterton, G. K., 275nChina and Chinese, 38, 149, 151Christ, 62Christianity and Christians, 41-2, 96, 98-9,

143, 145, 153-4, 158, 174, 189n-90,202, 209, 285, 292; see also Calvinism andCalvinists, Catholicism and Catholics, Prot-estantism, Puritanism, Socinians, Tho-mists, Unitarians

Chrysostom, John, 153Church Fathers, 153Churchill, Charles, 137, 237

Index 313

Cicero, 42, 144, 171, 178, 235, 293Cincinnatus, 235Clarendon, earl of, 233; History of the Rebellion,

233Clark, George Rogers, 81Clark, J. C. D., 243-5Clarke, William, clerk at Putney Debates, 17Clarkson, Lawrence, 54Clay, Henry, 86Clayton, Sir Robert, 233Cobbett, William, 201, 276, 286-97 pass.,

310; History of the Protestant Reformation inEngland and Ireland, 293, 309

Cochin, Augustin, 202n, 208nCohn, Norman, 52Coke, Sir Edward, 193, 280Coleridge, S. T., 101-2, 155, 158, 276, 291-

7 pass., 310; On the Constitution of the Churchand State, 190, 282, 292

Colley, Linda, 243, 245, 275nCollingwood, R. G., 10Comanche, 163Commonwealth, British, 85Commonwealth, Puritan, 233, 265; see also

Protectorate, Puritan RevolutionCommonwealth ideology and Commonwealth-

men, 32, 66, 75-87 pass., 129-40 pass.,158, 176-87 pass., 215-46 pass., 251-62pass., 267-74 pass., 279-90 pass., 295-6,302-10 pass.; see also Country ideology

Communist Manifesto, 114Condorcet, marquis de, 50Confucius, 23Congress, U.S., 266, 269, 272Conquest, Norman, 94, 309; see also Norman-

ism and NormansConstantine, 143Constantinople, 146, 153, 155Constitution, U.S., 88, 218Convention of 1689, 65, 224Convention at Dungannon (1780), 277Cookson, J. E., 287Corinth, 249Corporation Act, 159Country ideology, 32, 66, 75-82 pass., 108,

123, 129-40 pass., 158, 176, 180-1,216-35 pass., 241-9 pass., 257, 264,268, 277, 288-95 pass,, 302, 305, 310; seealso Commonwealth ideology and Common-wealthmen

Court Whigs, 135, 138, 235Covenanters, 238Craftsman, 180, 241, 246, 251-2Cromwell, Oliver, 63, 84, 155, 278Cropsey, Joseph, 70, 105

Cruickshanks, Eveline, 243Crusades, 182Crusoe, Robinson, 94Cumberland, Bishop, 219Cumberland, duke of, 302

Dauby, 226, 256Darien, 130; Darien Scheme, 113, 238Davenant, Charles, 231-2, 249n, 295Davie, George, 237-8Declaration of Independence, 8 In, 86, 162,

266-7, 274, 277Declaration of Rights, 225Declaratory Act, I66nDefoe, Daniel, 67, 99, 111, 113, 116, 147-8,

176n, 228n.-37 pass., 247-53 pass., 292,301

De Geignes, Joseph, Histoire des Huns, 151de la Court, Pieter, 46Denham., Sir John,, Cooper's Hill, 201de Pinto, Isaac, 132, 139Dickinson, H. T., 239nDiggers, 53, 123Dissent and Dissenters, 155, 159-88 pass.,

201, 211, 219, 229, 257, 283, 287, 293Dodington, Bubb, 244Dublin, 230Duke of Omnium (Trollope), 88Dumbarton, 253Dunbar, John, I68nDunn, John, 48, 65, 165

Eastern Empire, 154East India Company, 173nEast Indies, 254Edinburgh, 125-7, 196, 238-9, 252-3, 279Edinburgh Review, 300, 303, 305Einig&Originalschriften des llluminatenordens, 203Eliot, Sir John, 233Elliot, Gilbert, 127Engagement Controversy, 55, 223Engels, Friedrich, 242England, 1, 33-4, 45, 51-6 pass., 61-7

pass., 73-85 pass., 91-113 pass., 119-40pass., 151, 155, 162-6, 175, 180-7 pass.,196-212 pass., 218-54 pass., 259-66pass., 271-305 pass.; see also Britain

English language, 4, 7n, 44, 46, 48, 56, 73,121, 128, 150, 203-4, 207

Enlightenment, 63, 118, 143-5, 148, 152,158, 190, 218, 240, 264; Antonine, 155;English, 145; French, 144-5; Magisterial,220; Radical, 220, 291; Scottish, 144,191, 230, 237-8, 298, 310

Erasmus, 219-20

314 Index

Estwick, Samuel, 183Europe, 8, 31, 33, 77, 102, 109-10, 118,

143-58 pass., 181-212 pass., 230, 240,248, 254, 270, 280, 285, 299, 303

Everlasting Gospel (Blake), 291Exclusionists, 225, 230, 233, 257

Familists, 53Federalism and Federalists, 140, 217, 271Federalist Papers, I6n, 140Ferguson, Adam, 123, 252—3, 264; Essay on the

History of Civil Society, 130Ferguson, Robert, 225Fielding, Henry, 237Filmer, Sir Robert, 2-3, 55, 64, 95, 108-9,

176, 177n, 181, 222-3, 262; Patriarcha,3, 55n, 233

Financial Revolution, 68, 108-10, 112First Whigs, 218-25 pass., 229, 256, 265,

275, 295Fish, Stanley, 20-1Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 178, 230, 235-

9, 248, 251, 253, 272, 301; Discourse ofGovernment in Relation to Militias, 231

Florence, 45, 126Forbes, Duncan, 4, 9-50, 105, 125-33 pass.,

238-9, 251-2, 3O5nForster, E. M., Howard's End, 32nFounding Fathers, 83, 88, 140, 269-70, 275Fox, Charles James, 149, 187, 284-5, 296-

305 pass.Fox, George, 54France and Frenchmen, 45, 47, 102, 110, 131,

139, 143-5, 159-65 pass., 178, 186,231-40 pass., 249, 260, 275-88 pass.,307; see also French Revolution

Franklin, Benjamin, 126, 160, 162, 167, 207,269, 276

Franklin, Julian H. , John Locke and the Theory ofSovereignty, 223, 225n

Franks, 151Freeholder, The {Joseph Addison], 237The Freeholder's Grand Inquest, 3, 233French language, 6, 21, 40, 44, 204, 240, 260French Revolution, 1, 87, 101, 143, 155-6,

158, 186-90 pass., 194-212, 215, 230,276-88 pass., 293, 297-8, 300, 307

Freret, Nicolas, 152Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 178, 262Furet, Francois, 208n

Gaels, 253Gaius Gracchus, 184Gallie, W. B., 8

Garner, John Nance, 244Gaul, Merovingian, 143, 151Gay, John, 129, 131Gay, Peter, 144Geneva, 148, 173George I, 183George II, 244, 254George III, 80-5, 136-7, I49n, 241, 254-9

pass., 295, 302-5Georgian period, 86, 258-62, 306German language, 47, 103, 203Germany and Germans, 71, 94, 102, 115-19,

143-51 pass., 180, 300Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, 127Gibbon, Edward, 125-6, 131, 139-40, 158,

180, 199, 234, 240, 252, 278, 280, 285,298, 306; Decline and Fall, 116-19, 121,128-9, 143-56; Essai sur I'etude de la litter-ature, 152; "General Observations on theFall of the Roman Empire in the West,"143-51 pass.

Glasgow, 252-3, 279, 300Glasgow, University of, 196Gloucester, 159-61, 166-7, 186, 189Gnosticism and Gnostics, 153, 155God, 37, 41, 46, 55, 62, 93, 106, 163, 204,

209, 219Godolphin, earl of, 102, 234Godwin, William, 276, 290-1Goldberg, Jonathan, 19n, 27nGoldie, Mark, 224n; "The Roots of True

Whiggism," 225, 229-30Golgonooza, 291Good Old Cause, 33, 226, 228-9Gordon, Thomas, 240, 248Gordon, Riots, 139, 155, 278Goths, 48, 96-8, 101, 147-58 pass., 176-83

pass., 231, 235, 261, 301Gottingen, 203nGrand Remonstrance, 233Great Awakening, 165Great Cultural Revolution, 191Great Recoinage, 110, 175n, 3O2nGreece and Greeks, 96, 103, 144, 155, 186n,

235Greek language, 7, 40Greenberg, Janelle R., and Corinne C. Weston,

Subjects and Sovereigns, 2 2 0 - 1 , 267Gregory the Great, 153Grenvilles, 253, 279, 285, 295Grey, Lord, 303, 305Grotius, 105, 115, 171, 266Guicciardini, Francesco, 17, 25—6, 39—41Gunnell, John G., 27

Index 315

Hadrian, 153nHaitsma Mulier, E. O. G., 47Hale, Sir Matthew, 94, 299Hallam, Henry, 301Haller, William, 55Hamilton, Alexander, 67, 78, 87, 140, 217-

18, 272-3Hammond, Henry, 62Hammond, J. L., and Barbara, 304Hampden, Richard, 225, 233, 255, 303Hanoverians, 76, 131, 181, 216, 234, 239,

245, 248, 254, 257, 295Harley, Robert, 232, 295, 303Harrington, James, and Harringtonians, 3, 41,

43, 55-68 pass., 75, 79-80, 96, 106-9,122, 126, 134, 208, 221-36 pass., 244n,251-2, 268, 271, 288, 296, 307; Oceana,61-2, 78, 226, 292; see also neo-Harring-tonians

Hartley, David, 50Hartz, Louis B., 265-6, 269Hebrew language, 7Hegel, G. W. F., 23Heimert, Alan C , 165Helots, 190nHenry VIII, 190, 201, 281, 309Hexter, J. H., 40, 46, 53-4High Churchmanship, 189, 201, 232, 234,

240, 245, 264, 293Highlands and Highlanders, 111, 130, 238,

249Hill, Christopher, 30, 52-5, 123Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Inter-

ests, 113-14Historical Journal, 193Historicists, 37Hoadly, Bishop, 229, 251Hobbes, Thomas, 14-15, 24, 41, 47-68

pass., 96, 99, 112, 122, 170, 220, 270,291, 307; Leviathan, 11, 14

Hobhouse, J. C , 296Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels, 53Hogarth, William, 237Holbach, Paul-Henri, Baron d', 240Holland and Dutchmen, 46, 109-10, 205,

225, 238, 249, 260Holland House, 187, 300, 303, 305Hollis, Thomas, 233, 257Honest Whigs, 215, 276, 284Hooker, Richard, 171-2House of Commons, 76-8, 181, 220-2, 267-

8, 299, 302, 309House of Lords, 75-8, 221, 256, 267-8Hudibras, Sir, 165

Hudson Bay, 130Hume, David, 60, 78-81, 100-1, 105, 119-

54 pass., 159, 161, 177n, 181-8 pass.,196-205 pass., 222, 234, 239, 248, 250-2, 262-8 pass., 273, 280, 289-99 pass.,302-9 pass.; "Character of Sir Robert Wal-pole," 129; Essays Moral, Political and Liter-ary, 128-9, 131-2; History of England,127-41 pass., 181, 187, 203, 251-2, 255;"Of the Social Contract," l60n; Treatise,129; "Whether the British Government in-clines more to Absolute Monarchy, or to aRepublic," 133, 135

Hume Society, 24Hundred Days, 286Huns, 150-1Hunt, Henry, 296Huskisson, William, 289Hutcheson, Francis, 264

/ Ching, 22Illuminism and Illuminati, 155, 203—4Independent Whig, 240Independent Whigs, 234, 257, 284India, 77, 118, 254, 278n, 302, 304Indians, American, 118, 163, 179-80Indus River, 205Ireland and Irishmen, 73-5, 80, 85, 128, 162,

164, 189, 230, 264-78 pass., 287; see alsoBritain

Ireton, Henry, 56-8, 306Irish Parliament, 85Irish Revolution of 1912-22, 74Islam, 143, 155Israel, 62Italian language, 21Italy, 39-40, 42, 137

Jackson, Andrew, 86Jacob, James R., 220Jacob, MargaretC, 63-4, 220, 233, 291Jacobinism and Jacobins, 190-1, 208, 211,

274, 277, 283Jacobitism and Jacobites, 33, 176, 187, 225-

34 pass., 238-50 pass., 254, 257, 264,305

Jamaica, 178, 262James II, 75, 223, 228n-9, 284Japan, 108Jefferson, Thomas, 67, 81, 86, 126, 140-1,

147, 217-18, 237, 269, 272-3, 287; ASummary View of the Rights of British America,84, 266n

Johnson, Samuel, 161, 178, 225, 278

316 Index

Jones, J. R., The First Whigs, 218Judaism and Jews, 144, 152—3Julian, Emperor, 145, 153Junto Whigs, 230, 234, 303

Kames, Lord, 159n, 177nKelley, Donald R., 43-4, 46, 50Kemble, John, 300Kentucky, 163Kenyon, J. P., 233; Revolution Principles, 228nKing's College, 293King's Friends, 305Kinnaird, Douglas, 296Kiowa, 163Kirk, Russell, 171Kramnick, Isaac F., 159n, 242, 260-2, 292;

"Republican Revisionism Revisited," 259Kuhn, Thomas S., 3, 61

La Capra, Dominick, 27Lally Tollendal, Marquis T. G. de, 212Lamont, William M., 52La Rochefoucauld, 26Laslett, Peter, 2, 64, 217; The World We Have

Lost, 53; see also Philosophy, Politics, and Soci-ety

Latin language, 7; Latin peoples, 143Latini, Brunetto, 40Latitudinarians, 63-4, 191, 220, 229-38

pass., 264, 281Laud, Archbishop, and Laudians, 61—3, 190,

201, 281Lausanne, 143, 148, 156Law, William, 240Lawson, George, 22 5 n; Politica Sacra et Civil is,

223"Leicester House," 241Leslie, Charles, 160Letter from a Person of Quality to His Friend in the

Country, 226Levellers, 57-9, 225, 228-9, 257Levenson, Joseph, 158Linguet, Simon-Nicolas-Henri, 288Liskeard, 306Livy, 206-7Locke, John, 2, 15, 45-52 pass., 59-68 pass.,

104-23 pass., 150, 160-90 pass., 219-51pass., 258-63, 266, 275, 279, 290-1,302, 306; Essay on Human Understanding,229-30, 3O2n; Letters on Toleration, 229,302n; Reasonableness of Christianity, 229;Two Treatises of Government, 3, 18, 28, 48,

64-5, 108, 165, 167-9, 187, 217, 222-30, 258

London and Londoners, 81-2, 126-7, 137-9,156-66 pass., 178, 181-5, 205, 220-32pass., 237, 241, 246, 251-65 pass., 274,276-7, 288

Louis XIV, 202, 248Lowi, Theodore, 60Lucca, 41Lucretius, 144Ludlow, Edmund, 232Luther, Martin, 46Lycurgus, 114, 147

Mably, Gabriel Bonnet de, 144, 256Macaulay, Catherine Sawbridge, 79, 82, 257,

290Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord, 187,

196n, 224, 228, 237, 252, 255, 289,295-6, 300-6; History of England, 302,304, 306

McCulloch, John Ramsay, 123Machiavelli, Niccolo, and Machiavellianism,

17, 38-46 pass., 96-104 pass., 113, 117,126, 146, 206-7, 308; // Principe, 14

Machivellian moment, 180Mcllwain, C. H., 221Mackinnon, W. M., 308Mackintosh, Sir James, 283, 300; Vindiciae

Gallicae, 297-8Macpherson, C. B., 53, 60-71 pass., 105,

107, 209n; The Political Theory of PossessiveIndividualism, 59

Macpherson, James, Ossian, 130, 150, 253McWilliams, Wilson Carey, 60Madison, James, l6n, 67, 140, 271, 273, 307Madox, Thomas, 182; Firma Burgi, 260nMaecenas, 249Magna Carta, 182, 280Maistre, Comte Joseph Marie de, 158Mallet, David, 240Malthus, Thomas, 276; Essay on the Principles of

Population, 293Manchester, 184Mandeville, Bernard, 70, 99, 114, 123Mansfield, Lord, 8 InMao Zedong, 53Marat, Jean Paul, 276Marie Antoinette, 197, 199Maritime Powers, 249Marius, 146Marlborough, John Churchill, duke of, 102,

139, 234, 303Marsilius, 46

Index 317

Marvell, Andrew, 232Marx, Karl, 23, 61, 103-4, 122-3, 188,

208-9, 242, 246, 289, 308Marxism and Marxists, 3, 44-53 pass., 64,

71, 107, 133-4, 176, 191, 197, 199,208, 218, 23On, 241, 246, 258-9, 289-90, 294, 308

Massachusetts, 265Medici, 14, 248Mediterranean, 77Mesmer, F. A., 207Methodism, 189Mexicans, 205Meyer, August Ludwig, 203nMiddle Ages, 109, 119, 121, 130, 147, 182,

231, 292-3, 300-1Middlesex, 127, 161, 216, 277Milan, 153Mill, James, 123, 276, 291, 296, 304Mill, J. S., 310Millar, John, 188, 196, 199, 252-3, 279,

298-300, 305; Historical View of the En-glish Government, 298; Origin of Ranks, 198,298

Milton, John, 285Mississippi Company, 113Mitford, William, 186nModerate [party in Scottish clergy], 220, 238-

9, 264Modern Whigs, 231, 261Molesworth, Viscount, 264; Account of Den-

mark, 230Moliere, 41Molyneux, William, I68n, 264; Case of Ire-

land's Being Bound by Acts of Parliament inEngland, 230

Monitor, 254Monmouth's rebellion, 187, 225-6, 228, 245,

302nMonroe, James, 86Montagu, Charles earl of Halifax, Treasurer,

303Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 26, 219Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de,

78-9, 99-100, 113-18 pass., 122, 126,131, 144-50, 176n, 235; Esprit des Lois,42; Grandeur et Decadence des Romains, 206

Moore, James, 47Morning Chronicle, 284Morris, William, 310Moses, 62, 153-4Mossner, E. C , The Life of David Hume, 126,

128Moyle, Walter, 244n

Muggleton, Lodowicke, and Muggletonians,53-4

Muhammad, 205

Namier, Sir Lewis, and Namierites, 34, 81-2,158n, 243, 277

Napoleon, 102, 286Napoleonic Wars, 205, 262, 285-7, 296National Debt, 69, 76, 98, 112, 139-40,

175, 196, 234, 256, 285, 303Necker, Jacques, 212nNedham, Marchamont, 232neo-Harringtonians, 48, 64-5, 97, 107-8,

111, 191, 222, 226, 229-41 pass., 246,251, 259, 261-2, 287, 296, 303

Neoplatonism, 145, 152n-3, 155, 291Netherlands, see HollandNeville, Henry, 3, 222, 232, 235; Plato Redi-

vivus, 222Newcastle, Duke of, 77, 81New England and New Englanders, 73, 93,

172, 263, 273, 287Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 293New Model Army, 276, 295Newton, Sir Isaac, and Newtonians, 50, 63 -

4, 291New Town (Edinburgh), 126"New Whigs" (Burke), 284, 290, 295, 298,

309New Zealand, University of, 157Nine Years' War, 230Nixon, Richard, 83, 88Nonconformists, 286-7Normanism and Normans, 95—6, 251, 276,

293, 301North, Lord, 82, 84, 149, 303North Britain, 127-8North Briton, 137, 257Northwest Ordinance, 86

Oakeshott, Michael, 6, 13, 60Ockham, William of, 46O'Gorman, F., 279n, 284nOhio, 73, 81, 163Old Corps, 80, 284, 295, 303Old Corruption, 289-90, 295-6Old Whigs, 32, 69, 79-88 pass., 129-30,

137, 215-22 pass., 229-45 pass., 251,257-68 pass., 275-95 pass., 303, 309; seealso Whigs

"Old Whigs" (Burke), 284, 295, 309O'Neill, Sir Phelim, 73Orangeism, 274

318 Index

Ossian, 130, 150, 253Oxford, University of, 2, 63, 143, 189, 236

Paine, Thomas, 53, 74, 78n, 84, 175, 276- .7, 288-9; The Age of Reason, 289; CommonSense, 78, 136, 167, 276, 289n; The Rightsof Man, 288, 290, 297

Paley, William, 278Palgrave, Francis, 300Paris, 143, 279Parliament, 73-88, 91, 126, 138, 159, 161,

181-2, 184, 219-33 pass., 241, 247-56pass., 266-9, 274-7, 285, 295, 299-309pass.; Patriot Parliament, 278; RichardCromwell's Parliament, 56, 75; see alsoIrish Parliament, Scotland, Parliament of

Paul, Saint, 44Paulicans, 155Peerage Bill, 239Pelham Connection, 249, 253; see also Newcas-

tlePennsylvania, 73, 265, 288Pericles, 248Persia, 249Peterhouse, 34, 220Peters, Marie C , 246Petyt, William, 3, 221-2, 226, 233, 309;

Antient Right of the Commons of England As-serted, 222

Philadelphia, 82, 265, 276Phillips, Sir John, 246Phillips, Neville, 157-8Phillipson, Nicholas, 47, 237-8Philosophic Radicalism, 277, 296-7Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2 - 3Phnom Penh, 191Picts, 253nPitt, William, the elder, 80-2, 137-9, 156-

66 pass., 196, 209, 246, 253-4, 257,284-5, 295, 303-5

Pitt, William, the younger, 87, 102, 138Place, Francis, 296Plantagenets, 95, 251Plato and Platonism, 23, 114, 122, 144-53

pass., 174, 219, 283, 291-2Plumb, J. H., 51, 76, 86, 216, 243Pocock, J. G. A., 217-18; The Ancient Consti-

tution and the Feudal Law, 215-16 , 2 2 0 - 1 ;"Burke and the Ancient Constitution,"193-4, 210; The Machiavellian Moment,31-2, 44

Poland and Poles, 178, 183Polk, James, 86Polybius, 42, 96, 137, 145-6Polynesia, 151

Pompey, 146Pope, Alexander, 129, 131, 139, 240, 247n-

8; Dunciad, 139, 247Popper, Karl, 3Portland, duke of, 255n, 279, 285Posterior Analytics, 22Presbyterians, 63, 219Price, Dr. Richard, 139-40, 155, 160, 166-

78 pass., 186, 196-7, 228n-9, 263-4,274, 279-89 pass.; Observations on CivilLiberty, 160, 168

Priestley, Joseph, 155, 160, 166-8 pass.,263-4 , 283, 288n; Essay on Civil Govern-ment, 168

Protectorate, 63, 96Protestantism, 46, 144, 154-55, 164, 168,

237, 250, 293; see also Calvinism and Cal-vinists, Methodism, Presbyterians, Puritan-ism and Puritans, Unitarianism and Uni-tarians

Ptolemy, 10Pufendorf, Baron Samuel von, 115, 266Pulteney, William, 241Puritanism and Puritans, 52—4, 62—3, 84,

93, 139, 155-66 pass., 172, 185, 201,219, 236-7, 263, 265, 278

Puritan Revolution, 51, 55-6, 63, 73-7,136, 154, 201, 293, 302

Putney Debates, 17, 54-8, 240, 306Pym, John, 73, 233Pyrenees, 205

Quebec Act, 80

Rainborough, Thomas, 56Ranters, 53Rapin de Thoyras, Paul, 233, 251Real Whigs, 284Reeve, John, 54Reformation, Protestant, 54n, 154, 201, 251Reform Bills, 66, 207-8, 296-7, 306-10Reid, Thomas, 278Renaissance, 41-3, 50, 99, 126, 145, 217Restoration, 51-3, 63-4, 75, 94, 97, 181,

219-20, 236, 305Revolution of 1688, 1, 51, 64-78 pass.,

185-7, 196-7, 201, 215-30 pass., 251,279-84 pass., 296-309 pass.

Revolution Settlement, 158, 217, 287, 302Revolution Society, 186, 196, 264, 279Rhodes, 249Ricardo, David, 123Riesenberg, Peter N., 39Robbins, Caroline, 66, 215-16, 225-34

pass., 244n, 260, 295, 309-10; The Eigh-

Index 319

teenth-Century Commonwealthman, 215, 217,235

Robertson, William, 128, 177n, 181, 188-9,199, 210, 252, 264, 280; History of Amer-ica, 118, 120n, 179-80; History of Scot-land, 128; View of the Progress of Society inEurope, 119, 198

Robespierre, 156Rockingham, Lady, 255nRockingham Whigs, 82, 85, 255n, 303Roman Empire, 86, 119, 146, 149, 154; see

also Gibbon, Edward, Decline and FallRome and Romans, 39, 41, 48, 69, 96-9,

104, 114, 121, 137-53 pass., 158, 176-80 pass., 185, 195, 206, 210, 232-8pass., 247, 249, 253-63 pass., 292

Romulus Augustulus, 143Rota, The, 296Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 26, 47, 111, 118-33

pass., 148, 160, 169, 173-4, 185, 249,256, 270, 290; Discours sur I'origine de I'ine-galite, 180

Royalists, 225Royal Society, 63Rude, George, 53—4Russell, William, Lord, 178, 255n, 303Russia and Russians, 149, 151, 275Rye House Plot, 226

Sabine, George H., 37Sacheverell, Henry, 284St. Lawrence River, 81Sallust, 146, 148-9Samuel, 62Sandemanians, 290Saratoga, 149Sarpi, Paolo, 27Sawbridge family, 254Schuyler, Robert Livingston, 161Schwoerer, Lois G., 225, 228nScotland, Parliament of, 85Scotland and Scots, 1, 33, 47, 73-81 pass.,

97-8, 100, 110-11, 123-38 pass., 144,163, I65n., 175-81 pass., 187-9, 191,196-200, 210-20 pass., 230, 237-9,248-64 pass., 273-80 pass., 290, 297-310 pass.; see also Britain

Scott, Sir Walter, 298Scriptures, 165Second Amendment (U.S. Constitution), 218Sedgwick, William, 54Seekers, 53Selden, John, 299, 309Septennial Act, 76, 158, 216, 234, 239-47

pass., 255-65 pass., 270, 285, 295, 303

Seven Years' War, 159, 256Shaftesbury, first earl of, 65n, 167, 218, 255-

36 pass., 256, 263, 280Shaftesbury, third earl of, 219, 230Shelburne, Lord, 167, 178, 186, 263, 279Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 155Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 296Shklar, Judith N., 119nSidney, Algernon, 178, 223, 244n, 248n,

251, 255, 263; Discourses on Government, 3,222, 232

Skinner, Quentin, 3-7, 21, 48, 165; Founda-tions of Modern Political Thought, 5, 39-40,45-6

Smith, Adam, 70n, 78, 100, 111, 121, 123,126, 138-50 pass., 161-2, 183n, 188-99pass., 209, 252-3, 274, 276, 279, 298,310; Lectures on Jurisprudence, 49; Wealth ofNations, 102

Smollett, Tobias, 250-1, 253, 304; A Historyof England, 137; Humphry Clinker, 137

Society of the Friends of the People, 305Socinians, 155Socrates, 41, 174Somers, John, 303Sorbonne, 46South Britain, 128Southey, Robert, 292South Sea Bubble, 113, 204, 238South Sea Company, 76, 240Southwark, 181-2, 184Spain and Spaniards, 46, 143, 285, 303Sparta and Spartans, 96, 176, 180, 190n,

210, 236, 249Speck, W. A., 239nSpectator, 236—7; "Mr. Spectator," "Sir An-

drew," "Sir Roger," 236Spence, Thomas, 288Spinoza, Baruch, 46Squire, Samuel, 182nStalin, Joseph, 19, 286Stamp Act, 80Stanhope, Milord, 256States party, 47Steele, Richard, 99Stein, Peter, 49-50, 238Stewart, Dugald, 298Stoicism, 145Stone, Lawrence, 75, 86Stourzh, Gerald, 140Strahan, William, 126Strauss, Leo, 27n, 60, 171Stuarts, 76, 81, 225, 254, 299, 306Suarez, Francisco, 105Sulla, 146

320 Index

Swift, Jonathan, 102, 108, 129-30, 139,176n, 196, 201, 205, 237, 240, 248

System und Folgen des llluminatenordens, 203

Tacitus, 116-17, 125, 146-9, 248-9, 300;De moribus Germanorum, 150

Talbot, Richard, 73Tawney's century, 67Taylor, A. J. P., 286Taylor, John, 273, 288; Arator and Inquiry into

the Principles and Policy of the Government ofthe United States, 27 3n

Temple, Sir William, 107, 120-1, 134, 307Test Act, 159, 219, 287Teutons, 309Theodosians, 154Thing, The, 289, 293Thomason collection, 257nThomists, 46, 104Thompson, E. P., 53-4, 242-3, 292Thrale, Hester, 158nTiberius, 249Tocqueville, Alexis de, 276Toland, John, 230, 232-4, 244n, 257, 264;

Life of Milton, 232Toleration Act, 158, 219, 285, 287Toryism and Tories, 32-3, 65-87 pass., 95,

126-40 pass., 176-201 pass., 211, 216-310 pass.

Tower of London, 61Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), 234Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 234Trenchard, John, 230-1, 240, 244nTrevelyan, G. O., 243;G. N. Trevalyan, 304Trevor-Roper, H. R., 220; Lord Dacre, 300Trollope, Anthony, 88True Whiggism and True Whigs, 215, 222-

34 pass., 257, 284Tuck, Richard, 46; Natural Rights Theories, 45Tucker, Josiah, 85, 101, 114, 119n, 138-40,

159-91, 199, 229, 260n-73 pass., 279-91 pass., 303, 306, 309; Address to theLanded Interest, 183; Apology for the PresentChurch, 165; Essay on Trade, 184n; FourLetters to Shelburne, 178; A Letter to EdmundBurke, 163, 165-6; A Treatise ConcerningCivil Government, 119-21, 160-1, 166-7,171-2, 179-80, 185, 187

Tudors, 75, 183, 251Tully, James, 105, 108Tuveson, Ernest, Millennium and Utopia, 93Tyrrell, James, 3n, 233, 244n; General History

of England, 233n; Patriarcha Non Monarcha,222

Tytler, William, 14 In

Ulfilas, 154Union of 1707, 128, 131, 138, 237, 239,

250, 253Unitarianism and Unitarians, 93, 139, 196,

263, 265, 287United States, 140, 269-71, 287; see also

America

Vane, Sir Henry, 232Vattel, Emmerich von, 266Venice, 232, 249Versailles, 279, 282Vinerian professorship, 278Virgil, 249; Georgia, 148, 190Virginia, 73, 107, 114, 178, 262-73 pass.Voltaire, 144-5, 249; Siecle de Louis XIV, 248

Wadham College, 63Wales, 137Wallace, John M., 55nWalpole, Horace, 303Walpole, Sir Robert, 77, 129-40 pass., 159,

180-1, 209, 217, 240-55 pass., 262,272, 277-8, 295, 303

Warburton, Bishop, 178-9, 190War of the Spanish Succession, 234, 240, 285Washington, George, 178, 267Weinbrot, Howard, 249West, American, 163West, the, 38, 94-5, 97-8, 103-4, 108,

116, 119, 143, 146, 151, 154-5, 184West Indies, 190n, 246, 254Westminster, 181-2, 184, 237, 253, 288,

296, 305Westminster Review, 296Weston, Corinne C , 66; English Constitutional

Theory and the House of Lords, 221; and Ja-nelle R. Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns,220-1, 267

Whiggism and Whigs, 31-4, 48, 53, 65-85pass., 95-6, 101, 111, 119, 123, 126,131-9 pass., 158-9, 171-2, 175, 181-211 pass., 215-310; see also Court Whigs,Old Whigs, Rockingham Whigs

Wilberforce, William, 156Wildman, John, 220, 224-6Wilkes, John, and Wilkites, 81-2, 137-8,

245, 254Wilkins, John, 63William III, 230, 302-3, 305Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 190Wilson, Sir Robert, 296Winch, Donald, 123Windham, William, 279, 285

Index 321

Winstanley, Gerrard, 30, 54, 62 Worden, Blair, 232Wolin, Sheldon, 16, 37, 60 Wordsworth, William, 257, 292Wollstonecraft, Mary, 103; Vindication of the Wren, Matthew, 61-4, 67-8; Observations, 62

Rights of Man, 290; Vindication of the Rightsof Women, 290 Yorkshire, 101, 216, 277-8

Wood, Anthony, 236 Yorktown, 149, 162Wood, Gordon, 101, 217, 269Wootton, David, 27 Zoroastrianism, 152-3

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